| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"ArKLyte_" |
| Date: |
17 May 2004 12:22:22 PM |
| Object: |
CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately ... |
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Monday, May 17, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq — A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent (search)
recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said
Monday.
Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas (search)
was also recently discovered.
Two people were treated for "minor exposure" after the sarin incident
but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell
for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical
exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox
News.
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter
artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig.
Gen. Mark Kimmitt (search), the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told
reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised
explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy."
The round detonated before it would be rendered inoperable, Kimmitt
said, which caused a "very small dispersal of agent."
A senior Bush administration official told Fox News that the sarin gas
shell is the second chemical weapon discovered recently.
Two weeks ago, U.S. military units discovered mustard gas that was
used as part of an IED. Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group
(search) and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly,"
which made the gas "ineffective."
They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 for which
former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made
his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began
last year.
Investigators are trying to determine how insurgents obtained these
weapons — whether they were looted or supplied.
It also appears some top Pentagon officials were taken by surprise by
Kimmitt's announcement of the sarin discovery; they thought the matter
was classified, administration officials told Fox News.
Kimmitt said the shell belonged to a class of ordnance that Saddam
Hussein's government said was destroyed before the 1991 Gulf war
(search). Experts believe both the sarin and mustard gas weapons date
back to the Persian Gulf War.
"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time
and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to
explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that
and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in
it," Kimmitt said.
The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he added. The discovery
reportedly occurred near Baghdad International Airport.
It was the first announcement of the discovery of such a weapon on
which Washington made its case for war. Washington officials say the
significance of the find is that some chemical shells do still exist
in Iraq, and it's thought that fighters there may be upping their
attacks on U.S. forces by using such weapons.
The Iraqi Survey Group is a U.S. organization whose task was to search
for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in
last year's invasion.
The round was an old "binary-type" shell in which two chemicals held
in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt
said.
He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as
a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the
dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very
limited.
"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the
1991 Gulf War," Kimmitt said. "Two explosive ordinance team members
were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the
partial detonation of the round."
The shell had no markings. It appears the binary sarin agents didn't
mix, which is why there weren't serious injuries from the initial
explosion, a U.S. official told Fox News.
Not everyone found the deadly artillery surprising.
"Everybody knew Saddam had chemical weapons, the question was, where
did they go. Unfortunately, everybody jumped on the offramp and said
'well, because we didn't find them, he didn't have them,'" said Fox
News military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney.
"I doubt if it's the tip of the iceberg but it does confirm what we've
known ... that he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mad destruction that
he used on his own people," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox
News. "This does show that the fear we had is very real. Now whether
there is much more of this we don't know, Iraq is the size of the
state of California."
But there were more than weapons to the need to depose of Saddam, he
added. "We considered Saddam Hussein a threat not just because of
weapons of mass destruction," Grassley said.
Iraqi Scientist: You Will Find More
Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime,
told Fox News that he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the
former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria.
He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way
to Baghdad from the Syrian border.
George said the finding likely will just be the first in a series of
discoveries of such weapons.
"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military
warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said,
lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with
the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in
areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.
"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued,
saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to
find the weapons.
Saddam, when he was in power, had declared that he did in fact possess
mustard-gas filled artilleries but none that included sarin.
"I think what we found today, the sarin in some ways, although it's a
nerve gas, it's a lucky situation sarin detonated in the way it did
.... it's not as dangerous as the cocktails Saddam used to make, mixing
blister" agents with other gases and substances," George said.
Officials: Discovery Is 'Significant'
U.S. officials told Fox News that the shell discovery is a
"significant" event.
Artillery shells of the 155-mm size are about as big as it gets when
it comes to the ordnance lobbed by infantry-based artillery units. The
155 howitzer can launch high capacity shells over several miles;
current models used by the United States can fire shells as far as 14
miles. One official told Fox News that a conventional 155-mm shell
could hold as much as "two to five" liters of sarin, which is capable
of killing thousands of people under the right conditions in highly
populated areas.
The Iraqis were very capable of producing such shells in the 1980s but
it's not as clear that they continued after the first Gulf War, so
officials are reluctant to guess the age of the shell or the capacity
of the Iraqis prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to produce such shells.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo (search) cult unleashed sarin gas in
Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In
February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former
leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentence him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin
can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances
of the Nazis actually using the gas.
Nerve gases work by inhibiting key enzymes in the nervous system,
blocking their transmission. Small exposures can be treated with
antidotes, if administered quickly.
Antidotes to nerve gases similar to sarin are so effective that top
poison gas researchers predict they eventually will cease to be a war
threat.
Fox News' Wendell Goler, Steve Harrigan, Ian McCaleb, Liza Porteus,
James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
--
* See the REAL 'Religion of Peace', Islam, on this site - EXCELLENT
* http://www.mathematik.net/homepage/islam/islam.htm
* Translated: http://tinyurl.com/2ooqh
.
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| User: "Umayyad" |
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| Title: Re: CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately... |
17 May 2004 02:09:43 PM |
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ArKLyte_ wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Ah, I see that the US planting of WMDs in Iraq has started, and that the
soviet-like Amerikan "free-press" has already started to spread the good
news...!!!
.
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| User: "Bob" |
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| Title: Re: CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately ... |
17 May 2004 02:31:31 PM |
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"Umayyad" <Umayyad11@Iraqmail.com> wrote in message
news:40a90dd0$0$8146$afc38c87@news.easynet.fr...
ArKLyte_ wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Ah, I see that the US planting of WMDs in Iraq has started, and that the
soviet-like Amerikan "free-press" has already started to spread the good
news...!!!
We'll call this excuse #3.
1. It's just an old WMD.
2. It's not really a WMD.
3. Bush planted the WMD.
4. Israel planted the WMD.
5. It's only one WMD.
6. Rumsfeld should resign because it took so long to find any WMD.
7. Rove planted the WMD.
8. It's an election stunt.
.
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| User: "InsuranceBroker" |
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| Title: Re: CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately ... |
17 May 2004 02:36:44 PM |
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Subject: Re: CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered
Separately ...
From: "Bob" no@email.address
Date: 5/17/2004 3:31 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Message-id: <xg8qc.26971$5z5.2295@bignews2.bellsouth.net>
"Umayyad" <Umayyad11@Iraqmail.com> wrote in message
news:40a90dd0$0$8146$afc38c87@news.easynet.fr...
ArKLyte_ wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Ah, I see that the US planting of WMDs in Iraq has started, and that the
soviet-like Amerikan "free-press" has already started to spread the good
news...!!!
We'll call this excuse #3.
1. It's just an old WMD.
2. It's not really a WMD.
3. Bush planted the WMD.
4. Israel planted the WMD.
5. It's only one WMD.
6. Rumsfeld should resign because it took so long to find any WMD.
7. Rove planted the WMD.
8. It's an election stunt.
It is over a year since the United States invaded. If they were going to set
road side bombs with WMD they would have done it a long time ago. I could be
something rescently brought into the country. The borders are not secured
Few are going to believe that this one shell is the missing proof.
Doing Insurance business in the Garden State
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| User: "Bryan" |
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| Title: Re: CHEMICAL WMD FOUND IN IRAQ - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately... |
18 May 2004 12:13:08 AM |
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Umayyad wrote:
ArKLyte_ wrote:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html
Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq
Ah, I see that the US planting of WMDs in Iraq has started, and that
the soviet-like Amerikan "free-press" has already started to spread
the good news...!!!
Well perhaps one day more Americans will trust Al-Jahzeerah as you do
now, but until then, I'll try to consider that Reuters, AP, and most
American media who all report a common story, might in fact be more
trustworthy than the fabrications that comes from many international
media like Al-Jahzeerah.
.
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