Election Day is oming - do you know who you are voting for and WHY?

[silver]

Limited amounts being two?

[CessnaPilot]

can you PROVE that no more exist?

[CHJoker]

The thing you love about LIBERALS??

REally, that's just hilarious, and proves you have been hearing alot of Bush on the television.

THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. The OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT REPORT CLEARLY DEFINES THIS.

Do you need God to appear to you in a vision to confirm this fact?

And as an interesting note, I have voted REPUBLICAN in the past. I am not a " Liberal" whatever the hell this means. I am someone who READS ALOT, Looks for the facts, and tries to apply logic to most situations. I don't accept everything I see on TV, and I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person. Others, who know me, do as well. I am not communist, socialist, or anything else that ends with an -ist. I just want a President who represents what I hope the majority of Americans are...Smart, educated, fair, and sensible. BUSH IS NONE OF THE ABOVE.

Funny how REPUBLICANS, when pushed to the wall, come out screaming LIBERAL!!! LIBERAL!!!

When all else fails, and the facts stack up against you...SCREAM LIBERAL!!

[CessnaPilot]

Excuse me, show me the text in the official report that states "There were no weapons of mass destruction"

[DMK]

Yup, ditto. Sarin is nasty stuff, but its effectiveness of as a weapon of mass destruction is practically nil.

There have been more than a few reports that the (buthcered spelling ahead) Oshinriki cult developed, tested and manufactured their sarin gas in Australia and still have large caches there. I say we invade them!

As for your comment about Colin Powell's presentation, more's the pity that he has essentially lost credibility in front of his international peers. Pretty much every vital part of his presentation in front of the UN was subsequently discredited. Worse yet, it appears that the evidence was in thoroughly in debate before it ever got to him. Given how easily it was discredited after the fact I can only conclude that there were an unbelievable amount of stupid peopl eworking on the data or there was a serious orchestration of the data. Sorry, the intel folks might be in bureaucratic hell, but they ain't stupid.

[CessnaPilot]

From said governemnt report, page 13, key findings...

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire
to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

• The scale of the Iraqi conventional munitions stockpile, among other factors, precluded an examination of the entire stockpile; however, ISG inspected sites judged most likely associated with possible storage or
deployment of chemical weapons.


Sounds to me like they admit that not ALL locations were inspected, butthe most likely ones were and nothing was found there. Now If I was hiding thigs from the UN I sure would put them in likely locations....

[CHJoker]

UHHH... Why not do a little research?? Run a keyword seach on Report Weapons of mass destruction and see what you get.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6190720/

I also posted a CNN. com report, that is basically the same.

[nhwr]

A bit of a different direction but....

I have been reading a lot about polling lately. And have been listening to different people being interviewed. Zogbey says his group makes calls 10,000 to get a sample size of 1200 respondents. I think the polling numbers may be deceiving. I know many people of have only cell phones (they aren't polled) and other people who screen their calls with caller ID (so they aren't polled either). All of the online polls I have seen predict Kerry by a clear majority.

It will be interesting to see the actual outcome. I wonder if the election will be as close as predicted.

[CHJoker]

Quote the whole piece, please, not just what you want to hear.

Instead, U.S. inspectors found only limited signs of the banned weapons after the active fighting ended. Among the findings:
A single artillery shell from Saddam’s pre-1991 stockpile was filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent.
Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs that it once contained mustard agent.
Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, showed signs that they once were filled with sarin.
Centrifuge parts were found buried in a former nuclear scientist’s garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam’s pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.
A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, was found in another scientist’s refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.
Evidence emerged of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT WAS THERE WERE NO WMD manufactured after 1991.

Can we end this now?? How much more proof do you need??

[CHJoker]

Please, stop trying to make this report say ANYTHING other than what it says so clearly...

Lawmakers slam White House after long search yields no Iraqi WMD


Washington News


- WASHINGTON (AFP) via News.Designerz.com Wednesday October 06, 2004

AFP/File


Democrats slammed the White House for leading a months-long search to uncover an Iraqi weapons program that apparently did not exist when the United States invaded the country.

Lawmakers hammered chief US weapons inspector Charles Duelfer after his Iraq Â*Survey Group (ISG) came up empty-handed in searching for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction program -- the basis for Washington's decision to invade Iraq Â*in March 2003.

Duelfer conceded at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he probably would not find "militarily significant" stocks of weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq .

"What you're telling us is that in addition to having no WMD stocks before the war ... Saddam chose not to have those weapons," said Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat on the committee.

"Those are stunning statements," said Levin. "That is a 180-degree difference from what the (George W. Bush) administration was saying before the war."

"The fundamental conclusion of the ISG effort means that the administration's two major arguments for going to war against Iraq Â*were incorrect," Levin said.

Duelfer said that not only did Iraq Â*not have an active weapons program but it had not pursued banned weapons since weapons inspections began in 1991.

Duelfer told the panel he found the remnants of a former weapons program in delapidated condition, which could have been reconstituted at a future date if Saddam had the opportunity.

But lawmakers angrily noted that that risk was far from the immediate threat the White House had insisted the Iraqi leader posed at the time of the US invasion.

"We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction," Levin said.

In addition to Duelfer's testimony, the Iraq Â*Survey Group issued a report Wednesday which underscored the absence of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US-led invasion.

And while Saddam Hussein hoped to develop a long-range missile system, his weapons development program was in such disrepair that little work was ever done on warheads, Duelfer said.

When challenged by Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the group's "wild goose chase" for WMDs despite several months and millions of dollars spent looking for the weapons, Duelfer defended the effort.

"My task was not to find weapons of mass destruction, my task was to find the truth," he told the committee.

Duelfer could not explain why Saddam did not try harder to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors in a bid to avoid invasion by the United States and its allies.

"It's a question which many of us have puzzled over," he said. "It really requires you to get into Saddam's mind.

"The answer is, it's difficult to know for certain," continued Duelfer, who said Saddam apparently failed to understand that business as usual no longer applied after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

"He wanted to get sanctions lifted. He kept trying to bargain and barter and had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer told the senators.



Â*

[CessnaPilot]

chjoker - can I start posting things from partisan committess too?

[Erin]

Cessna, I don't doubt that Hussein might have had other weapons, and obviously he has used chemical weapons in the past, so the fact that those existed at one time in Iraq is an established fact.

But really... two 13-year-old shells? How exactly were those supposed to be a "grave and building threat" to the American public? What, was Saddam going to send one over FedEx?

Bush led the world to believe that Saddam had a rigorous weapons program and was stockpiling WMDs, and that he was an immenent threat. None of that has turned out to be true. And while it just may turn out that he's got a missile silo hidden down a rabbit hole, I think most reasonable people (including Tony Blair, I believe) have come to admit that Hussein didn't have the WMDs they thought he did.

Don't you think he would have used them if he had them, rather than letting the U.S. troops kick his butt?

[CHJoker]

YES, please post ONE single thing that a REPUBLICAN committee REFUTES THIS REPORT, and that there were, in fact, major stockpiles of WMD, and that Saddam was actively manufacturing them.

[CessnaPilot]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by CHJoker:


Quote the whole piece, please, not just what you want to hear.

Instead, U.S. inspectors found only limited signs of the banned weapons after the active fighting ended. Among the findings:
A single artillery shell from Saddam’s pre-1991 stockpile was filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent.
Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs that it once contained mustard agent.
Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, showed signs that they once were filled with sarin.
Centrifuge parts were found buried in a former nuclear scientist’s garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam’s pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.
A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, was found in another scientist’s refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.
Evidence emerged of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT WAS THERE WERE NO WMD manufactured after 1991.

Can we end this now?? How much more proof do you need?? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Thank you for providing my proof... read your last sentence..

THE CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT WAS THERE WERE NO WMD manufactured after 1991.

There were no WMD MFGR AFTER 1991.. Okay I'll bite on that one, but it in no way states that there WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION like you would prefer it to. The fact that they found ANY precludes your statement that there were NO WEAPONS... Wanna debate the meaning of NO?

[J. Turner]

What drives me nuts about the gay marriage debate is that the candidates don't even clarify that there is distinction between religious marriage and civil marriage. There should be a marked distinction as there is in France where people get married in a church and have a separate civil ceremony at the hotel de ville. Who is any government to tell a church what holy matrimony is? If a church doesn't want to recognize gay marriage, great, fine - go for it. It's the church's right. It gets my ire up to even hear a politician use the term "sacred." It's not up to the freakin' government to determine sanctity, folks!

Legal marriage is not a sacred issue. It should allow legal rights. That's it. Inheritance. Insurance. Next of kin. If two people are willing to put their lives and money in another person's hands, who has the right to tell them they can't? It ought to have nothing to do with how they get off in the privacy of their own bedroom! Goverment - get OUT of the bedroom. Stay OUT of the church.

George Bush divided this country when he said that God talked to him. Sorry, but to me and a quite a few million others, that make him look like cult leader in the making. Not all Americans believe in God. Not all Americans believe God talks directly to people. Not all Americans want a religous zealot as President, no matter how spiritual we are personally. How arrogant to assume God is on our side! How the heck do you know? Are you the next prophet or something? Sure you got the Bible belt on this one, but there are a lot of Bible thumpers down here I would not be proud to associate myself with. Think before you speak, W.

[silver]

Cessna Pilot, that's a pretty weak arguement. One or two old shells do not a weapons program equal.

This is kind of a fun video to watch*. It warns you against despotism!!!!

*Shamelessly ripped off from metafilter.

[DMK]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by CessnaPilot:
Excuse me, show me the text in the official report that states "There were no weapons of mass destruction" <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

WHAT official report? Was there some independent investigation into this war that I was unaware of?

However, we have had a few people investigate this stuff in the past year or so. First we had the IAEA and the UN inspectors in there. Honestly, in retrospect, that was about as good as it got for the Bush administration. Naturally of course, Blix et al were not permitted back in. Bush sends hand picked David Kay. David Kay goes in, comes out, says "no nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapons program, no caches of biological or chemical weapons and no capability to send long range missilies with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons." That's pretty much it for the definition of WMD, and that is a hell of a lot more expansive than the case we were sold as reason to invade.

Bush administration is not happy. Cheney reminds everyone that if Saddam could of made a weapon he would have. Joe, a disenfranchised teens in Michigan agrees that if he could have made a nuclear weapon he would have too. Ashcroft declares a terror alert just to remind everyone whose really in charge.

Dulfeur goes in. You'd think they'd learn their lesson. More of the same (see AP quotes below).

Look, I haven't seen a report, I'm not even sure it's formally declassified. But at the end of the day, TWO handpicked US inspectors and teams have gone into that country with free rein and both have come out with exactly the same conclusion and nobody in the administration has disputed their accounts.


<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Who would have guessed that Charlie Duelfer would have served up the key talking points for John Kerry in Friday night's debate.

This from the AP ...

Contrary to prewar statements by President Bush and top administration officials, Saddam did not have chemical and biological stockpiles when the war began and his nuclear capabilities were deteriorating, not advancing, according to the report by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group. (emphasis added)
and this from a longer AP piece running on CNN ...

Duelfer found that Saddam, hoping to end U.N. sanctions, gradually began ending prohibited weapons programs starting in 1991. But as Iraq started receiving money through the U.N. oil-for-food program in the late 1990s, and as enforcement of the sanctions weakened, Saddam was able to take steps to rebuild his military, such as acquiring parts for missile systems.
However, the erosion of sanctions stopped after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Duelfer found, preventing Saddam from pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Duelfer's team found no written plans by Saddam's regime to pursue banned weapons if U.N. sanctions were lifted. Instead, the inspectors based their findings that Saddam hoped to reconstitute his programs on interviews with Saddam after his capture, as well as talks with other top Iraqi officials.



So, no weapons. No clear plans for future weapons. No advances in nuclear program. In fact, a clear deterioration in the nuclear program. Plus, 9/11 sealed up the eroding sanctions.


-- Josh Marshall <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

[CHJoker]

Cessna,

Providing your proof? THERE WERE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. The ones manufactured prior to 1991 had been destroyed. The weapons programs were dismantled. There may have been a few laying around, but NO WHERE near the threat Bush proclaimed.

Let's get over this, shall we?? If saying at the end of the sentence, " manufactured after 1991" makes all the difference, then fine.

It doesn't change the fact we were under NO DIRECT THREAT from Iraq, and we attacked them anyway.

[CessnaPilot]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by CHJoker:
YES, please post ONE single thing that a REPUBLICAN committee REFUTES THIS REPORT, and that there were, in fact, major stockpiles of WMD, and that Saddam was actively manufacturing them. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Chjoker - try to stick to the topic at hand, I NEVER said that there were major stockpiles, or that saddam was actively manufacturing them. Once again you are taking the liberal slant that by stating they exist, then he must have been stockpiling them and manufacturing them, I did not say either of those things.

And again. this is a weapon of mass destruction that was found.. so the statement that there were NO WMD's is in fact false.

[CessnaPilot]

chjoker - So are you now stating that unless we are attacked, we should not fight. Hmmm... that scares the hell outta me.