IRAQ: It’s Springtime in Baghdad
He takes good care of his plants, watering them from the river, which is better for flowers and plants, according to his neighbor Abbas Al-Amiri from Al-Amiri nursery. “Tigris water is better than the tap water from the tanks,” he said. As for the red sand that covers Baghdad when the seasonal khamasin winds blow, he said it does the plants no harm. “In fact, it protects them from insects, because we can’t afford to buy the pesticides or the proper soil.”
So who is using the pesticides that are being found?
A large number near other stored weapons!
Pentagon intelligence reported no reliable evidence of Iraqi WMD's last September
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Jerusalem Post ^ | Jun. 6, 2003 | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Posted on 06/06/2003 1:09 PM PDT by yonif
The US Defense Intelligence Agency last fall could not pin down the location of any chemical weapons facilities in Iraq but had no doubt about the existence of programs designed to produce chemical and other weapons of mass destruction, the DIA's director said Friday.
Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the agency's director, said news reports about excepts from a September 2002 DIA report should not be interpreted as meaning his agency doubted that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction program.
But he acknowledged that at that time the DIA could not find chemical weapons facilities.
"We could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction program, specifically the chemical warfare portion," Jacoby said at a joint news conference with Sen. John Warner,and Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence chief.
They spoke after the Senate Armed Services Committee met privately with Jacoby, Cambone and an unidentified CIA representative to discuss prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
The September 2002 DIA report is notable because it coincided with Bush administration efforts to mount a public case for the urgency of disarming Iraq, by force if necessary. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others argued that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was hiding them.
"We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons," Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee on Sept. 18, 2002.
In his description of the still-classified DIA report, Jacoby drew a distinction between the level of certainty about Iraq's pursuit of weapons and the existence of actual chemical weapons.
"As of 2002, in September, we could not reliably pin down - for somebody who was doing contingency planning - specific facilities, locations or production that was underway at a specific location at that point in time," he said.
That report "is not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had any doubts that such a program existed," he said.
Two months after major fighting in Iraq ended, US officials have yet to find any chemical or other mass-killing weapons, although they still express confidence that some will turn up.
Rumsfeld recently raised the possibility that Iraq destroyed the weapons before the war started March 20. He also has said he believes some remain and will be discovered when US search teams find knowledgeable Iraqis who are willing to disclose the locations.
In making its case for invading Iraq, the administration also argued that Iraq was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and that it might provide some of its mass-killing weapons to terrorists.