Post #105,228
6/7/03 10:58:55 AM
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Not destroyed.
C'mon now - destroyed without a trace? A major weapons program? Ask any forensics expert - it's damned hard to destroy ANYTHING without a trace.
These are substances we are talking about - chemicals, biology, nasty radoiactive shit. It doens't go away easily. Crushing it doesn't make it go away. Burning it makes other identifiable stuff. Even if you had a black hole to dump it in, you'd have dirty containers, dirty rags from the cleanup. In a brutal regime, you'd have dead people with nasty toxic and radiologic damage or bad diseases from rushed cleanup efforts.
Look at the Superfund sites.
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Sometime you the windshield, sometime you the bug...
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Post #105,230
6/7/03 11:01:08 AM
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perhaps but bleach will kill all the bio stuff
almost all anyway, and they have found sites and trailers that reeked of bleach anfd not much else.
thanx,
bill
will work for cash and other incentives [link|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html|skill set]
questions, help? [link|mailto:pappas@catholic.org|email pappas at catholic.org]
"I hit him so hard in the head his dog shat a turd in the shape of Jesus" Leonard Pine
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Post #105,477
6/10/03 12:20:23 AM
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Bleach kills
pretty effectively. But getting every nook and cranny is hard. A bleach job is called "disinfecting" and very pointedly NOT "sterilization".
Seems to me that the residue, while not viable, should still be at least somewhat identifiable.
And if the trailers were bio-weapon production facilities - that's the major world-threatening program? That's what we went to war over? That's why we changed the rules of warfare in ways that give every two-bit dictator an excuse (hey, his economy is growing faster than mine, he might buy weapons...) to invade his neighbor? That's what we cashed in all our 9/11 goodwill chips for?
Yeah, in the right circumstances the germs those trailers could have cranked out could have done some damage. And in the right circumstances, a cow can burn down Chicago.
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Sometime you the windshield, sometime you the bug...
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Post #105,506
6/10/03 9:41:31 AM
6/10/03 9:44:10 AM
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Hey, Speaking of burning down Chicago:
We've got the perfect WMD right here in that toddlin' town:
[link|http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-pox10.html|Prairie dogs!]
jb4
"We continue to live in a world where all our know-how is locked into binary files in an unknown format. If our documents are our corporate memory, Microsoft still has us all condemned to Alzheimer's."
Simon Phipps, SUN Microsystems
Edited by jb4
June 10, 2003, 09:44:10 AM EDT
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Post #105,231
6/7/03 11:29:24 AM
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CIA report on the "mobile labs"
[link|http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/5966868.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp|SJMN from May 29]: The CIA published a paper Wednesday titled [link|http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraqi_mobile_plants/|"Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants'' [FAS link]] detailing the inspection and testing of the two trailers and declaring that they are ``the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.''
CIA officials spoke to reporters in a conference call. One said, ``We are highly confident that we have discovered what Secretary of State Colin Powell introduced at the United Nations in February: a mobile biological warfare lab.''
[...]
The findings, however, are unlikely to end the debate over where Iraq's alleged chemical and biological weapons are, or whether they and the Scud missiles Baghdad was accused of hiding even existed on the eve of war.
Tests of samples recovered from a fermenter tank, liquid from pipes and swabs from a wipe-down of the trailers so far have not produced any evidence that the Iraqis were producing bioweapons or ``anything else,'' one analyst acknowledged. ``It is not necessary to get positive samples to confirm that this is a biowar generator,'' he said.
The sampling process identified sludge found in the fermenter on one of the trailers as a mixture of sodium azide and urea, a caustic and puzzling mixture that isn't usually associated with any production process, including that for bioweapons.
``The combination of chemicals we found makes no sense,'' one official said.
However, the officials said, the size and configuration of the equipment made it highly improbable that it was intended to make hydrogen, biopesticides, vaccines or pharmaceuticals; to serve as a mobile medical laboratory or for water purification; or to produce single-cell proteins for animal feed.
The intelligence officials concluded that the captured units, which were the first part of a two- or three-trailer production facility, could have produced a wet slurry of ``any of the classical BW agents -- botulinum or anthrax'' that other units could have purified, concentrated, dried and ground into two to more than four pounds of dry biological weapons per month.
Four pounds of dry agent ``is a lot,'' one official said. ``It would kill a lot of people. A lethal dose of anthrax is 10,000 spores.''
Intelligence officials believe that the Iraqis built as many as nine or 10 of the two- or three-trailer production facilities, which would mean that as many as 25 pieces of equipment are still missing. The FAS link above has a copy of the full report. It's an interesting read. I think the CIA's assessment is the most logical one at the moment. Cheers, Scott.
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Post #105,237
6/7/03 12:30:37 PM
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and maybe not
Not everyone's on board just yet. American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.
"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process."
The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.
Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light. [link|http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nyt/20030607/ts_nyt/someanalystsofiraqtrailersrejectgermuse|http://story.news.ya...lersrejectgermuse] cordially, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
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