Posted on 05/21/2004 6:55:23 AM PDT by 11th Earl of Mar
C'mon people!
Attacking the person and not the argument is childish - something I'd expect from DU.
While the child-molestation jabs are at times amusing, I'd say his piece was overall pretty accurate. A single shell is in no way indication of an active WMD program.
Unfortunately for those who thought we'd find a massive WMD program to back up Bush's main justification for the invasion, Ritter seems to have been VERY right indeed with his WMD claims - both before and after the war.
The best he can say is yes, its possible the device was from a stockpile and its also possible it was from a dud found in the desert. Then compare and contrast.
He clearly dismisses out of hand any indication that he weighs all possibilities equally.
As for attacking the man, when someone writes something like this its a waste of time to take it apart and making fun of him is certainly the best reaction.
Fantastic, loved your post
SPIN ONE FOR THE FLIPPER!!!
Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining.
Since we know Saddam's sarin had only a few week shelf life once combined (I think that was the time I read - certainly well short of years), the sarin cannot have mixed in flight on this supposed dud. Thus, the rupture disk must have failed to burst. And, since the components of the sarin were still in the round, the bursting charge must have failed to go off.
So what we have here, to belive this lying traitor, is a round that was fired, and which had two independent systems fail. It's just not going to happen.
A little bit of elementary mathematics, even assuming his rediculous 10% overall failure rate, with 3 distinct failure modes (no mix, no fuse, insufficient propellant). If we assume for simplicity that the odds of each of these 3 failure modes is equal (not very likely, but all we have to go on for this simple exercise), then there's a 3.3% chance of any one type of failure per shell fired. For two independent failures, that 3.3% squared, or 0.1% chance for a dud to occur in this way.
Since his failure numbers are obviously inflated (there's no way there's a 10% overall failure rate), the odds of a dud existing are even lower than this.
You mean Inspector Cluesoe?
I did 6 years in the National Guard with a 155mm Artillery battery and can't recall one dud.
We never fired chemical rounds, but HE, flares, and atomic simulators never failed. We used a variety of fuses, impact, timed and radar, and never had one failure.
I recall one time a projectile was launched with the wrong propellant charge, it still went off when it hit the ground about 100 yds in front of the Forward Observers. No one was hurt but a wardrobe change was necessary.
Just exactly what enemy was Saddam shooting at, there along the Syrian border? Or did the users cart a dud from the Iranian border all of the way across Iraq to the Syrian border to set a trap?
Ritter's WMD claim? Besides what he wrote below, David Kay indicated that Saddam now had an indigenous program...were he didn't have to have "stockpiles" of weapons. Because of the years of inspections, Saddam had set up the infrastructure to whip up WMDs on demand. This was even further confirmed ealier by Ritter himself, who said that Saddam could reconstitute his various WMD programs within weeks to months. I think Ritter actually put it best in 1998:
From The New Republic, Dec. 21, 1998:
"As a member of UNSCOM since 1991, and its chief inspector responsible for investigating Iraq's concealment mechanism from July 1995 until my resignation on August 26, 1998, I know that this is hardly the first time Saddam has pulled such tricks. In fact, they are at the heart of his strategy for preserving his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, getting rid of U.N. economic sanctions (which he has largely succeeded in eluding anyway).
Through skillful manipulation of the situation on the ground in Iraq, international public opinion, and rifts among the members of the Security Council, Saddam actually aims to cap his comeback by getting UNSCOM to issue a clean bill of health. It is an audacious plan, but it may succeed, thanks in no small part to the mistakes of U.S. policymakers themselves.
If it succeeds, the consequences could be dire. The Baghdad regime-- strengthened by having retained the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and psychologically fortified by having outlasted the world's sole remaining superpower--will rapidly restore its internal and regional constituencies and reemerge as a force to be reckoned with.
Since his defeat in the Gulf war, Saddam has built up eight years' worth of resentment and frustration that can only be released through renewed efforts at territorial expansion through armed aggression and blackmail, both economic and military. Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed.
UNSCOM lacks a full declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq's retained proscribed arsenal inherently tentative. But, based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents.
Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.
Meanwhile, Iraq has kept its entire nuclear weapons infrastructure intact through dual-use companies that allow the nuclear-design teams to conduct vital research and practical work on related technologies and materials. Iraq still has components (high explosive lenses, initiators, and neutron generators) for up to four nuclear devices minus the fissile core (highly enriched uranium or plutonium), as well as the means to produce these.
Iraq has retained an operational long-range ballistic missile force that includes approximately four mobile launchers and a dozen missiles. And, under the guise of a permitted short-range missile program, Iraq has developed the technology and production means necessary for the rapid reconstitution of long-range ballistic missile production.
Iraq supports its retained prohibited capabilities with an extensive covert procurement network operated by Iraqi intelligence. While images of starving Iraqi children are beamed around the world by American television, Iraqi front companies have spent millions of dollars on forbidden material related to all weapons categories--in direct violation of existing sanctions and often under the cover of the humanitarian "oil for food" program.
Finally, Iraqi security forces have kept critical documentation, including the vital "cookbooks" that contain the step-by-step process to make chemical agent, outline the procedures for producing weapons-grade biological agent, detail the final design of the Iraqi nuclear weapon, and provide the mechanical integration procedures for long-range ballistic missiles."
>>Anyone else wondering WTF Scott Ritter is doing writing in Pravda?
["In 1990, Scott Ritter divorced his wife to marry 19 year old Marina Khatiashvili, a Russian Model recruited and used by the KGB to sexually compromise US Intelligence Sources in the 1980's during the Nuclear Disarmament Period."]
http://www.ropma.net/ritter.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1127446/posts
Sadaam never declared having this type of shell and UN inspectors had previously indicated that Sadaams chemical shells required mixing the two components prior to firing the shell. This shell was more likely to have been acquired after 1996 and could not have been previously fired. Scott Ritter knows this and is purposely providing deceptive information - AKA - lying!
Good Lord! What the hell was this man doing as part of our inspections team?!
PS.. Notice how Ritter in this 1998 article has already labled the Oil for Food Program a fraud.
Failure of the rupture disk is not a reasonable factor. Between the g-force from the firing and the g-force of the impact, the rupture disk will rupture. The difference in g-force for safe handling and the g-force of typical use is so great that the design parameters do not have to be that tight. A failure of the rupture disk will occur about as often as a water balloon not breaking on impact with cement when thrown off the top of a three story building.
Excuse my ignorance of things military, but if this shell had previously been fired, even if it was a dud, wouldn't it have been destroyed or seriously deformed upon impact? In the Kennedy assassination, we had the "pristine bullet" controversy; now we have a "pristine dual-chamber shell" controversy.
What kind of nonsense is this? It's like finding an automobile and saying there's no evidence of an automobile-manufacturing program. The idea that this binary artillery shell is a unique custom-made item is pretty ludicrous.
By the way, what is the minimum threshold of deadly doses of Sarin before a weapon can be considered an WMD ? --5 thousand? -5 million? 5 billion? ---what's the number?
---just curious.
>>Good Lord! What the hell was this man doing as part of our inspections team?!
Working for Comrade Klinton?
It is so sad to see a former Marine turn into a seditious piece of offal, such as Ritter. Writing for Pravda is just the latest in his spiral downward. Like his compatriot Benedict Arnold, I suppose he will live abroad for the rest of his life.
The metal casing of an artillery shell is actually quite hard metal. It takes the explosive force of the detonation to rip it to shreds, the shreds (known as shrapnel) become mini-projectiles and inflict much of the damage caused by the shell. A shell landing in the ground without the explosive charge detonating, would not sustain any damage other than a few scratches.
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