[JohnGalt]

Companion piece:

WMD claims of Iraqi 'colonel' treated sceptically

[talleyman]

Nothing to see here - move along, now...

[Hodar]

This brings on a question of itself. Based upon the utter and complete incompetence of Saddam and his thugs; the level of both incompetence and subterfuge within his ranks; Could his army have been armed with cornmeal; and told it was a chemical weapon? Who would know the difference? Who would dare blow the whistle?

[looscnnn]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1036105/posts turned into discussion about this and other things having to do with Iraq, WMD, war, etc.

[XJarhead]

I don't buy the colonel's story. It's full of holes. RPG are a point-detonating round, whereas you'd want a base-detonating for chems or bios. Why not use an 82mm mortar round instead? It makes no sense.

On top of that, he first claims in the original article that the WMD/RPG's were going to be used only by Fedayeen or SRG. But then, he says that the Fedayeen distributed them to front-line units such as his. Huh? And if such something as small and easily concealable as RPG's were distributed to frontline units, you'd think one of those units that didn't fight would have retained at least one of those things.

I don't doubt this guy was the source of the claim made by Blair, nor do I think it was unreasonable for us to conclude that this was evidence of WMD's. I just think that either the colonel himself was lied to by his superiors (which seems to be a common theme in the Iraqi army regarding WMD's), or he's a liar himself.

The bizarre irony of this whole thing is that Saddam's efforts to convince his army that he had a "secret weapon" may have been the exact disinformation we relied upon in reaching our conclusions. He meant to lie only to his own troops -- he didn't count on us eavesdropping on those lies and also being convinced.

[DouglasKC]

This has got to be bumped....