thanks faq for the eloquent post. I am not in the regular practice of writing long explanations for things.
Everything I can dig up stops at state department.
I even followed the money and who awarded the contracts.
However the why part still remains.
I am at a loss why someone says that a chem bomb is old means that it is not legit.
Saddam was not supposed to have any chem weapons. If the UN teams cleared tuwaitha previously, then where were the old bombs stored before they were moved to tuwaitha. Fact is there is no innocent explanation for the presence of chem weapons at a nuke lab that the Iraqis claimed was doing peaceful nuclear work.
The place was a high priority for saddam given the hundreds of small details in the photos I did not point out due to time limits imposed by YouTube.
“I am at a loss why someone says that a chem bomb is old means that it is not legit.”
Let me see if I can explain this to you. During the Iran/Iraq war the Iraqis were producing large amounts of chemical weapons and loading a lot of it into artillery rounds. One of the tactics of the Iraqis was to store it in underground bunkers up near the border of Iran. Some of the smaller bunkers which had only a few remaining artillery rounds in them were covered by sand and never recovered by the Iraqi army. Farmers in Iraq would occasionally come across these abandoned bunkers and call US forces in order to claim the reward that was available for information on WMDs. We would go and examine the rounds and sometimes discovered SARIN gas rounds. We would drill into them and remove some of the sarin gas for analysis. In every case the sarin gas was so old as to be totally ineffective as a weapon. You could only be harmed by ingesting it. We would then destroy them. Clearly, the WMD we went to war with Iraq over was not old abandoned WMD in a few dozen 15 year old artillery rounds.
In any case, it is totally irrelevant that we didn’t find WMD in Iraq. Iraq had the know how and the capability to resume production at any time, so going in was as much about stopping Saddam from making them as it was about finding already produced WMD. We know he was capable of using them and capable of giving them to terrorists, so as far as I am concerned our invasion was 100% justified.