So, Think This Will Get Any Media Attention?

[Guest MikeSC]

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

 

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

 

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

 

UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the council on June 9 that "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.

 

"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

 

"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

 

He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. Destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.

 

The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters – the latter required for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

 

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax."

 

The UNMOVIC report said Iraqi missiles were dismantled and exported to such countries as Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, one of at least 12, was discovered in a junk yard, replete with UN tags. In Jordan, UN inspectors found 20 SA-2 engines as well as components for solid-fuel for missiles.

 

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Buchanan said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

 

UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime. Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.

 

In April, International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohammed El Baradei said material from Iraqi nuclear facilities were being smuggled out of the country.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_1.html

I doubt the press will play this up to any great degree.

-=Mike

[Guest thebigjig]

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

 

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

 

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

 

UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the council on June 9 that "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.

 

"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

 

"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

 

He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. Destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.

 

The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters – the latter required for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

 

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax."

 

The UNMOVIC report said Iraqi missiles were dismantled and exported to such countries as Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, one of at least 12, was discovered in a junk yard, replete with UN tags. In Jordan, UN inspectors found 20 SA-2 engines as well as components for solid-fuel for missiles.

 

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Buchanan said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

 

UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime. Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.

 

In April, International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohammed El Baradei said material from Iraqi nuclear facilities were being smuggled out of the country.

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_1.html

I doubt the press will play this up to any great degree.

-=Mike

Does this assumption include Fox News?

[Guest MikeSC]

Does this assumption include Fox News?

Nope. Just the "legitimate" news sources --- you know, the "impartial" ones.

-=Mike

[Guest thebigjig]

say whatever you want, but CNN is 100X more impartial than Fox... either way, it's too soon to tell on whether this will get media play... wait until Monday when the Reagan stuff starts to fade

[Guest thebigjig]

Oh... and I thought the UN were the bad guys?

[Guest MikeSC]

say whatever you want, but CNN is 100X more impartial than Fox... either way, it's too soon to tell on whether this will get media play... wait until Monday when the Reagan stuff starts to fade

CNN has as many axes to grind as Fox.

 

Difference is, you agree with them, so you mistake them for being impartial.

-=Mike

[Mystery Eskimo 0]

So they dismantled their weapons, like they were told to?

[Guest MikeSC]

So they dismantled their weapons, like they were told to?

Dismantled LONG after they were supposed to be dismantled and when all of this was being debated.

 

And, quite frankly, the fear of them shipping it around is one of the reasons we attacked in the first place.

-=Mike

[Jobber of the Week 0]

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

 

Once it starts showing up in the AP and elsewhere, I'll be more content to believe it.

[Guest MikeSC]

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

 

Once it starts showing up in the AP and elsewhere, I'll be more content to believe it.

And the cycle continues.

-=Mike

..."Where are WMD's?"

"Well, there is this UN report that the media is ignoring."

"Well, if I don't see it in the media, I don't believe it. So, where are they?"

[Jobber of the Week 0]

I'm not saying I don't believe it. I don't know anything about the source so they could be correct for all I know. I'm keeping guarded skepticism. Wait and see.

 

FWIW, I believe this more than I would if it was a NewsMax exclusive or something.

[Guest Cerebus]

A quick search of "UNMOVIC" at Google News turned up this better written Financial Times (a very reliable source) article on the same thing.

 

Banned Iraqi weapons looted for scrap

By Stephen Fidler in London

Published: June 10 2004 23:08 | Last Updated: June 10 2004 23:08

 

Rocket motors and equipment potentially usable in chemical and biological weapons programmes have been streaming out of Iraq since the US-led invasion, United Nations weapons inspectors say.

 

The appearance of some of this material - some of which is radioactive - in scrapyards outside Iraq suggests the breakdown of order in the country has allowed widespread looting of sites holding highly sensitive equipment.

 

Yet efforts to deal with the issue have been hindered because the UN agency charged with dealing with this material - Unmovic - is barred by the US-led coalition from going into Iraq and has no communication with the Iraq Survey Group, the US-led body searching for weapons of mass destruction inside the country.

 

Evidence of the spreading of this material outside Iraq was contained in an Unmovic report to the UN Security Council this week. Demetrius Perricos, the acting head of Unmovic, told a closed session of the council on Wednesday that a visit by an Unmovic team to a scrap- yard in Jordan had turned up 20 SA-2 missiles in a scrapyard, along with equipment usable in banned weapons programmes.

 

This equipment included chemical reactor vessels, heat exchangers, a mixer for solid rocket fuel and other processing equipment, some of it in good condition.

 

The rocket engines, designed for surface-to-air missiles, had all been tagged by UN weapons inspectors inside Iraq to prevent their being converted into Al-Samoud ballistic missiles forbidden to Iraq under UN resolutions.

 

An Unmovic team is planning to visit scrapyards in Turkey, Mr Perricos said.

 

Unmovic was alerted to the exporting of the material when an SA-2 rocket engine turned up in a scrapyard in Rotterdam. The engine found had been tagged in 1995-6, but workers at the site estimated between five and 12 other engines had previously passed through.

 

The organisation had been called in by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which itself had been called in to investigate the appearance of radioactive material in the yard. Later IAEA tests showed the radioactive material to have come from Iraq.

 

Ewen Buchanan, the Unmovic spokesman, said scrapyards do not hold on to material for long so the investigation so far had only provided a snapshot of what may have left Iraq.

 

He said better co-operation with the Iraq Survey Group would help account for some of the material.

 

In case you STILL don't believe it, here's a link to the UN News Service article.

 

7 June 2004 – Engines of two surface-to-air missiles from Iraq have turned up at a scrapyard in the Netherlands, according to a new report by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), tasked by the Security Council to probe the country’s illicit arms programme.

 

Commission experts have verified that one of the engines came from an Al Samoud 2 missile – proscribed under international sanctions – that had been tagged by UN inspectors in the past.

 

UNMOVIC says this new development demonstrates the difficulty of discovering the scope of Iraq’s clandestine arms programme. “The existence of missile engines originating in Iraq among scrap in Europe may affect the accounting of proscribed engines known to have been in Iraq’s possession in March 2003,” it says.

 

Representatives of the scrapyard indicated that up to a dozen similar engines had been seen there earlier this year, while more could have passed through unnoticed.

 

The report also points to evidence that more scraps have been shipped from Iraq. “Company staff confirmed that other items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys bearing the inscription ‘Iraq’ or ‘Baghdad’ had been observed in shipments delivered from the Middle East since November 2003,” the report says.

 

After examining a number of these items, UNMOVIC experts found that they were composed of inconel and titanium – both “dual-use” materials which could be used either for civilian or military purposes.

 

Recent satellite imagery indicate that a number of sites in Iraq previously known to have contained equipment or materials subject to international monitoring have been “either cleaned out or destroyed,” according to the report.

 

UNMOVIC does not know whether the goods there were still present at the time of coalition action in March and April 2003, but it notes that some of the materials may have been removed by looters and sold as scrap.

 

It's too late for me to read through the whole report (which can be found here) but this is the real deal.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war.

 

How in the hell could he be dismantling WMD when he's running scared like a rat? And so far we have "components." A piece of shielding to go on the side of a missile is components. Nothing evidences that there was actually any completed rockets.

 

And when did the UN suddently become a believable source to you guys, anyway?

[Guest MikeSC]

Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war.

 

How in the hell could he be dismantling WMD when he's running scared like a rat? And so far we have "components." A piece of shielding to go on the side of a missile is components. Nothing evidences that there was actually any completed rockets.

 

And when did the UN suddently become a believable source to you guys, anyway?

Ah, so evidence is not enough for you, eh? You need a big missile with the words "NUCLEAR BOMB" clearly printed on it to buy it?

 

The UN is a corrupt organization full of thugs.

 

However, they have ZERO benefit in lying about this.

-=Mike

[Guest Cerebus]

I never said otherwise and, I must say, I'm impressed that you dismissed everything in that report with OMGCOMPONENTS~! At the bare minimum, it means that Saddam disobeyed SC Resoultion (surprise!) and sold components of his aresenal, forced to be dismantled by UNSCOM, to God knows who outside the country (and if he would do it with dismantled rockets, you bet he would do it with other, much more easily smuggled, CBW material). BTW, you quoted from that "World Tribune" article, which was really poorly written esp. compared to the other reports.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Components. Again, metal would count as a component. Components is at most illegal. Components is not WMD-ready chemicals.

 

And if the weapons HAVE been moved to God knows who outside the country, doesn't that mean that the war has actually made things worse? If you thought Saddam was a problem, wait until you find out he gave his arsenal to Osama (or whoever else). First it was a haven for terrorists, and now it's an eBay for bomb parts if you believe that UN guy in the first article who said "slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."

 

Anyway, we now have an AP and NYTimes story on this now. The Times article is actually pretty good. Here's a piece for those of you who are too lazy to get or find a login with their site:

 

Demetrius Perricos, deputy to the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and now the acting executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told a closed session of the council that many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect dual-use materials having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons.

 

Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

 

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

 

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Mr. Buchanan said.

 

He said that a fermenter was a good example of a dual-use item that was potentially dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter," he said. "You can also use it to breed anthrax."

 

Still does not exactly spell success for Bush, though.

[Guest Hero to all Children]

Not to be an ass here but what happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"

 

I mean .. this is not a smoking gun. It's not even a gun that has been fired once in a life time. Hell, it looks more like an L carved out of soap to me.

 

What they found was rockets. Everyone knew that Iraq had rockets, just prior to the Iraq war they were squabbeling with the UN because they had rocket engines that could reach Israel (which they were forbidden to possess) but weren't actually able to fly that far if they were mounted onto a rocket (see, weight and all. The tests where all theoretical and without reacl rocket-launches.)

 

And loads of dual use equipment. Which has the capability of being used to breed anthrax (well, the fermenter does) but can also be used to produce medicine.

 

 

So what we have here is circumstantial evidence. We've got a bunch of scrap metal and old rocket engines that we knew they had, we have dual use equipment that we most likely sold to them ("we" meaning the US, Europe and maybe Australia/Russia) and all of that crap is being shipped to the most random places that will take it.

 

 

 

I'll make a crappy analogy now, you've been warned.

Does anyone remember this movie from the 50's about a young man accused of stabbing his father to death, the jury being rather convinced of his guilt save one man. Who valiantly fights for the boy's life by disproving various allegations of the prosecution, convincing everyone but one juror who holds some kind of a personal grudge. I think it was called Twelve Angry Men but I'm not sure.

 

That's what this kind of reminds me of, though I'm not giving anyone any specific roles.

 

 

However .. the evidence is strong enough to prove you right if you're already convinced of a truth. If you think Iraq had WMDs then this will be the final proof to you, if you think it didn't then this will just be scrap metal and hollow accusations.

[Firestarter 0]

Does anyone remember this movie from the 50's about a young man accused of stabbing his father to death, the jury being rather convinced of his guilt save one man. Who valiantly fights for the boy's life by disproving various allegations of the prosecution, convincing everyone but one juror who holds some kind of a personal grudge. I think it was called Twelve Angry Men but I'm not sure.

Yes it was, and it was written by Reginald Rose. Brilliant play and a good movie, but a godawful argument.

 

what happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"

In war? Doesn't exist. Gets you killed.

 

"Gee, that soldier coming towards me with the Nazi stormtrooper insignia on his uniform might be the enemy, and yeah, the rifle he's carrying might be loaded, but I don't think it'd be right to shoot him until I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt..."

 

<bang>

 

<thud>

[Guest INXS]

This is hardly concrete, earth shattering stuff. It's not the "WMD" find that Bush needs.

[Stephen Joseph 0]

Actually, it makes perfect sense and should be more troubling that finding WMD. The fact these things got shipped out, who knows who got ahold of them...

 

I sincerely doubt 20 years of intelligence gathering by multiple military and civilian organizations were wrong.

 

Just because you can't find your car keys, doesn't mean they don't exist.

 

Kudos to Cerebus for the linkage.

[Guest MikeSC]

This is hardly concrete, earth shattering stuff. It's not the "WMD" find that Bush needs.

Forgot. The UN stating that Saddam shipped off components right before and during the war probably is totally innocent.

 

Left: "The Holocust didn't happen"

Sane people: "Yeah, it did. We have eyewitness accounts, photos, the whole nine yards."

Left: "Did you see it yourself?"

Sane people: "No."

Left: "Our point is proven."

-=Mike

[Guest INXS]

Not the WHOLE of the left thinking people of the world think that the holocaust didn't happen. I certainly don't think that it never happened. That's a very, very poor comparison to make.

[Guest MikeSC]

Not the WHOLE of the left thinking people of the world think that the holocaust didn't happen. I certainly don't think that it never happened. That's a very, very poor comparison to make.

It's becoming more and more accurate every day. Anti-Semitism is so deeply ingrained in the int'l left (it hasn't hit the US too badly, yet) that it is almost comical.

-=Mike

[Guest INXS]

You've made outlandish comments here before but that one takes the biscuit. I've yet to hear of anyone denying that the holocaust ever happened and certainly don't believe that it's a widespread thought throughout the international left. Anti-semitism is more rife amongst hardline right-wingers than the left.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

France is supposed to be the bastion of left-wing thought and that country is the poster child for Anti-Semitism.

[Guest INXS]

That made me laugh. Get a clue.

[Dr. Tyler; Captain America 0]

France is supposed to be the bastion of left-wing thought

According to whom?

[Guest INXS]

I found his claims that France is the "poster child" for Anti-semitism the most hilarious.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

I constantly hear them brought up as far as modelling US society after them. And there were tons of people saving we should follow the Frence example before the Iraq war. I probably should've said extreme left-wing thought to be more accurate though.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

I found his claims that France is the "poster child" for Anti-semitism the most hilarious.

France has to be one of the most anti-religious countries I've ever seen. They discriminate pretty heavily against the Muslims too.