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And such was the consensus of the US Intelligence Community

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Originally posted by citizen:
But then even Tony Blair admitted that the evidence for Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction program was politicised, so there being a consensus in the US/UK governments doesn't prove a thing, except lots of people were duped by purposefully manipulated data, data manipulated by people who had already made up their minds.

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I mean, if you were a cop, and arrested a four time loser drug pusher who's also guilty of several counts of perjury, would YOU take his word for it when he fingers someone as his supplier ?

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Originally posted by rue:
"Iraq's production of biological weapons was assessed to be largely dormant ... We assess Iraq's production of chemical weapons to be largely dormant."

One doesn't have to be an expert to read the plain language.

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I thought there was no where near enough evidence to justify a war, what do I win.

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I realize that it’s all as simple as the sun coming up tomorrow for you, but that’s because you’re opinion is independent of the data or scientific process.

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And Kwicko just goes along with whoever tells him what he wants to hear.

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Frem assumes his usual conspiracy theory nonsense.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
People went with their best assessment of the Intel

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
People went with their best assessment of the Intel

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That is your considered, objective opinion I take it?

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
People went with their best assessment of the Intel

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That is your considered, objective opinion I take it?

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It is.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
While many politicians may stretch the truth, that’s not really the problem here. Politicians went, by and large, with the content experts. It wasn’t politicians that came up with the idea that Saddam had WMDs, this was the widespread consensus of the intelligence community. Very little of the evidence to support WMDs in Iraq was ever very conclusive. People went with their best assessment of the Intel, but many people do exactly what you do. In the absence of conclusive evidence, they interject their ideology into the vacuum. Your hypothesis goes into the function, but never encounters data solid enough to confirm or deny it, so it emerges untouched. Instead of realizing that there is no way to test the hypothesis, it is viewed as confirmation. And so people begin to see their own point of view as indisputable doctrine, flawlessly validated over and over again. Much as you see your point of view as being as indisputable as the rising sun, when in fact it is completely untested. This is the problem - just in the other direction, not politicians.

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Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.

Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.

-- Cicero

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And yes AnthonyT, many of us are with you on that theory.

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Originally posted by rue:
"One doesn’t have to be an expert to cherry-pick two phrases and take them out of context either."

Not cherry picked - THOSE WERE THE CONCLUSIONS.

DUH !

One would have to be an idiot to not read the conclusions ... don't you agree ?

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
This conclusion of mine seems so apparent now that I've come to it, that I wonder why I didn't see it sooner. I assume other people have come to conclusions similar to my own.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
But there is reason why in most cases, when we talk about Intel, we rarely talk in terms of conclusions, but rather we use the term “assessment.”

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I think my job gives me a different perspective then most of you. I’ve seen first hand how difficult and unreliable this kind of evidence is.

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I don’t think for one minute that any president has ever had to distort the evidence when it comes to Intel, because this stuff is already so convoluted that in many cases you can see whatever you want to see in it.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Actually I think it's a whole lot simpler you paint it: All of those allusions to nuclear clouds, and Rummy saying that WMD were deployed east, west, north, south somewhat of Baghdad and Tikrit was so just so much LIES. There was not a shred of evidence ANYWHERE that Saddam possessed a WMD program, much less "massive stockpiles" or "deployed WMD". There was no evidence whatsoever that Saddam posed an imminent threat, as he had neither the weapons nor the delivery systems.

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Originally posted by citizen:
This is Bullshit Sig, we still had the receipts.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
how do you get from "We're not finding anything" to "Massive stockpiles"?

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
Yes, and you made the wrong one concerning WMD, whereas Signy and I made the correct one, but your assessment was somehow acceptable even thought it turned out to be incorrect or 'questionable' at best, while our assessment was flawed even though it turns out to be on the mark- see, this is what I mean by ideological illogic.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
In which case it is up to the viewer to get to the truth; find the reality of the thing. And Bush- according to you- didn't do that.

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Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
therefore logic would suggest they still exist. Until evidence surfaced otherwise

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You made your assumption based on the ideological premise

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there was no evidence that he destroyed them

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– therefore logic would suggest they still exist

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But other people did, and most of the time they were lead around on wild goose chases by Saddam’s people, ultimately casting doubt on the ability of weapons inspectors’ to arrive at any kind of confident result.

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Originally posted by rue:
I'll be curious to see if Finn replies to you with ---- I never said that !



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Silence is consent.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
No Finn, that's not logic, that's the 'have you stopped beating your wife ' tac.
Go ahead and prove lack of something to me. Prove you aren't a witch. Prove you haven't hidden a McDonald's fillet O fish in an air vent in a building in your city. Wait- you have a history of dancing ability- prove you can't do the Macarena (and don't try faking lack of knowledge, we have experts that can tell).

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Originally posted by rue:
Well, his history is he never fails to disappoint when it comes to parsing words. God forbid you should do anything but quote him exactly. And if you press him on what he meant, he goes away.

But maybe he just does that if the post comes from a girl. EEEWWWWwwww

Perhaps a more manly, man-to-man conversation gets somewhere.

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Originally posted by rue:
SignyM

I was going to mention that but you got there ahead of me - it doesn't matter what they thought Iraq might possibly have had in 1999 - by 2003 the biologicals and most of the chemical weapons would have been less useful than rocks. Without production to constantly replenish them, the stocks would have degraded to nothing, along with Iraq's CBW capability. And as Finn's own quotes show, Iraq had no production capability.

And as we all know, and knew at the time, Iraq was not engaged in developing nuclear weapons.

So much for those WMDs.

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So you’re a chemist too, huh? Well so much for that. Neither of you know what you’re talking about.

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And biological agents can, in fact, be stored long term, if stored correctly.

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Chemical agents, of course, are not biological – they don’t die. VX remains deadly indefinitely, and its precursors are stable too. Iraq had both, agents and precursors.

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In some cases, it is quite clear that any stocks that were retained no longer exist in usable form. Most chemical and biological agents are subject to processes of deterioration. A working paper by UNSCOM from January 1998 noted that: "Taking into consideration the conditions and the quality of CW-agents and munitions produced by Iraq at that time, there is no possibility of weapons remaining from the mid-1980's" (quoted in Arms Control Today, June 2000). As discussed below, mustard constitutes an exception to this general pattern. This point was acknowledged by UNMOVIC in its 6 March 2003 working document, specifically about remaining warheads which had been filled with chemical agents, but seemingly applicable to any storage of chemical weapons:

"While 155-mm projectiles filled with Mustard could be stored for decades, it is less likely that any remaining warheads filled with nerve agents would still be viable combat munitions."

UNMOVIC, "Unresolved Disarmament Issues" (6 March 2003), p.55.

If the allegations that Iraq possessed a stockpile of illicit weapons were to be true, then the UK and US would need to present credible evidence that Iraq had managed to stabilise its chemical and biological agents to a greater extent than it is previously thought to have done.

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Up to 1998, a substantial part of the work of the weapons inspectors in Iraq was to track down chemical and biological agents that Iraq had produced before their entry in 1991, and to check the documentation that showed how much of each agent Iraq had manufactured. However, the amount Iraq is thought to have produced in the 1980s was found to be greater than the quantity that Iraq or the inspectors verified as having destroyed. The discrepancy between the two levels is the amount that remains - in the inspectors' language - "unaccounted for".

The levels of agents that are unaccounted for in this way is large, as many of the US and UK claims above rightly identify. But the fact that these quantities are unaccounted for does not mean that they still exist. Iraq has never provided a full declaration of its use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980-88 war, and it claims to have destroyed large quantities of its own stocks of these weapons in 1991 without keeping sufficient proof of its actions.

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It should be noted firstly that the UK and US have never claimed that Iraq continued to produce chemical or biological weapons in the period of UNSCOM inspections, between 1991 and 1998.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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So you’re a chemist too, huh? Well so much for that. Neither of you know what you’re talking about.

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Actually, since I worked on CWA-detection and readiness response project for the DOD I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Let's start with bioweapons. Saddam HAD anthrax. Liquid anthrax. There is NO WAY to store that "properly". When Colin Powell showed the UN a vial full of powder... that was a big fat lie.

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According to you. Can you show me conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein did not weaponize anthrax, based on what we knew prior to 2003? Probably not.

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It is most likely that, as it had declared, Iraq was unsuccessful in 1989/90 in acquiring a special dust-free spray dryer to safely dry large quantities of anthrax. [...] In any event, it seems likely that no bulk drying of agent took place in either 1989 or 1990.Apparently, in 1989, large-scale BW agent production was in its initial phase and Iraq was expecting to obtain from an overseas company a special dryer for its future requirements. Therefore, there seemed to be little reason, at that time, to modify existing dryers to make them safe for BW agent drying. An Al Hakam annual report for 1990 makes no reference to large scale drying of BW agents, implying that no drying occurred in that year either. The annual report, which UNMOVIC considers reliable, indicates that research into the drying of anthrax continued in 1990, but even this ceased for that year when the foreign company failed to supply the special dryer.

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Secondly, while VX may degrade in long-term storage, it remains lethal for a very long time. It does not degrade into corn syrup, and even very tinny amounts of VX are deadly. Then there’s mustard – an agent, which even you don’t deny, remains dangerous past its shelf life, and many munitions containing mustard have in fact been found in Iraq. So we know for a fact the Iraq did not destroy all of its Chemical weapons.

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But when research is done and the limits are known, paranoia should be laid to rest.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

And getting back to the original point: That is how I knew that Saddam DIDN'T have WMD.

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