Powell-Unlikely WMD Stocks willBe Found in Iraq(back to"he used them in 88

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=578&e=4&u=/nm/20040913/pl_nm/iraq_usa_powell_dc

Powell:Unlikely WMD Stocks Will Be Found in Iraq(back to"he used them in 88")

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell, who made the case to the world that pre-war Iraq had stocks of chemical and biological weapons, said on Monday he now thought these will probably never be found.

"I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles," Powell told lawmakers when asked about the intelligence behind his Feb. 5, 2003, U.N. Security Council speech laying out U.S. arguments for the war with Iraq that began six weeks later.

Powell's latest comments appeared to be his most explicit to date suggesting that the central argument for President Bush's decision to invade Iraq -- the belief it possessed weapons of mass destruction -- was flawed.

As early as January Powell said it was an "open question" whether or not such arms would be found and he conceded the possibility Iraq might not have had any when the war began. <snip>

U.S. officials have also said that whether or not it had stockpiles in 2003, Iraq was a threat because it had possessed and used chemical weapons in the past, notably to kill 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988. <snip>

[Myrina]

1. So did anyone ask him, then,

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE THERE ?????? :mad:

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. Why we knew Saddam had no WMD

Most of Saddam's WMD were secretly destroyed by US military special ops at the close of the First Gulf War, a secret still being closely guarded by the Pentagon. In its inquiry on Gulf War Syndrome in the early 1990's known as the "Reigle Report", the US Senate noted that significant stockpiles of chemical, biological, and missile technology had been shipped to Iraq by private US companies, pursuant to export licenses granted by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In 1997, the CIA finally admitted that the US military destroyed sarin tipped warheads at the gigantic weapons depot in Iraq at Khamisiyah, at the close of Gulf War I. In its report entitled "Kharmisiyah: An Historical Perspective On Related Intelligence" the CIA finally admitted that the US government had gassed its own people, namely the US military in the theater of war, when it detonated warheads in a bunker containing sarin gas. While the CIA has only revealed one instance of the known destruction of Saddam's stockpile at the end of the First Gulf War, I'm willing to bet there is much more out there about the fact that we knew where those WMD were at the end of the First Gulf War and we sent special ops deep into Iraq to destroy them before we withdrew our armies. The opportunity was just too good to pass up.

We kept the gassing of our own people a secret (1) to avoid the massive expenditure associated with the treatment for Gulf War Syndrome and (2) to avoid having to explain how we knew and identified the very WMD we had sold Saddam Hussein. The lie was perpetuated as it came in very handy to justify an illegal war, even though classified records would prove that we knew we had destroyed Saddam WMD.

[crickets]

3. Re: CIA Report

Found the text. Ouch.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/gulfwar/whiteper/

[Cocoa]

4. ya think?