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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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 Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 1:41 am Post subject: There were no WMDs... and may never be. |
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This is a good example of how fear is used to create a cowering, pliant populace to advance agendas that are anything but American and in no way about the advancement of freedom.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051029/ap_on_re_mi_ea/terror_dark_vision_i
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AMMAN, Jordan - After the warehouse raid in northern Jordan, the word from authorities horrified the people of Amman. Terrorists linked to al-Qaida had assembled a fearsome array of chemicals and planned a bombing that would send a 2-mile-wide "poison cloud" over this Middle East capital, killing as many as 80,000 people, military prosecutors said.
Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers had finally concocted a weapon of mass destruction.
A year later, in the hard light of scientific scrutiny, that sinister scenario looks more fictional than factual.
"Eighty thousand! That would have been like Hiroshima. And that was an atomic bomb," says Samih Khreis, one of the alleged plotters' lawyers.
The defense attorneys aren't alone in scoffing at the "WMD" claim. International experts checking the suspects' supposed list of chemicals — from the industrial compound ammonium to the explosive nitroglycerin — say either the defendants or the Jordanian authorities, or both, had little inkling about the makings of a chemical weapon.
The compounds "may generate some toxic byproducts, but they're unlikely to result in significant deaths by poisoning," said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former senior U.N. adviser on chemical weapons.
The poison cloud of Amman is one more dubious episode in the story of the terrorist quest for doomsday arms, a dark vision that has become an axiom of today's counterterrorist strategy. Four years into the "global war on terror," half the Americans surveyed this summer said they worry "a lot" about the possibility of such a WMD attack, according to the U.S. polling firm Public Agenda.
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Amid all the warnings, boasts and chilling tales, however, the daunting difficulties of fielding such weapons usually go unmentioned — along with al-Qaida's glaring lack of expertise and stable home base, the unreliability of Internet "formulas," and the progress made worldwide in locking down the raw materials of the most destructive arms.
Amman's is one of many stories of exaggerated threats or ill-conceived plans. Others include:
_British police last year arrested eight people on suspicion of plotting a bombing that would spread osmium tetroxide, a dangerous corrosive compound. But this volatile chemical would have burned up in any explosion, scientists say.
_The long-jailed Jose Padilla, an American al-Qaida member accused of planning a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, is said by U.S. officials to have hoped to use uranium. But uranium has low radioactivity, and would have had no more impact than lead in a bomb, scientists note.
_Eight Algerian and Libyan defendants accused of "conspiracy to manufacture chemical weapons" were freed in London last April after authorities acknowledged tests showed a substance found in one of their apartments was not highly lethal ricin, as earlier alleged. The plant extract, effective as a poison dealt to individuals, was long ago dismissed by military arms-makers as an impractical mass-casualty weapon.
_American WMD specialists in Iraq reported that insurgents there last year recruited a Baghdad chemist to make the blistering agent mustard, a chemical weapon developed in World War I. They said he had the right ingredients, but he couldn't produce the compound.
"Regardless of what people say, this is very difficult to do, to inflict mass casualties with chemical or biological weapons," said Jonathan Tucker, an authority on unconventional arms with California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. "One really needs large quantities."
Oregon toxicologist Dr. Robert Hendrickson calculates that terrorists would need 1,900 pounds of sarin — more than 200 gallons — to kill half the people in a typical open-air baseball stadium. So much liquid, with dispersal devices, would be extremely difficult to conceal and to produce, probably taking 10 years in a basement-sized operation, experts say.
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"A chemical bomb needs a qualified chemist," Khreis said. "Al-Jayousi has a 6th-grade education."
Some analysts say the facts of chemistry may mean little in the end for those who want to terrorize populations, as long as the word "chemical" is heard on air or seen in headlines.
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"One needs only to look at the adjectives used by the media to describe chemicals to understand why the general public is frightened: toxic, killer, lethal, deadly," said Hendrickson, of the Oregon Health and Science University. |
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BigBlackEquus
Joined: 05 Jul 2005
Location: Lotte controls Asia with bad chocolate!
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 1:52 am Post subject: |
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| Wow, and I complain that Koreans can't get on with life sometimes....... |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 2:58 am Post subject: |
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| BigBlackEquus wrote: |
| Wow, and I complain that Koreans can't get on with life sometimes....... |
How can it possibly be seen by you as not getting on with life? Why not take your on advice rather than acting as if a current situation is somehow resolved, or that this is not an issue for governments in general?
But, hey, thanks for your input.  |
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BigBlackEquus
Joined: 05 Jul 2005
Location: Lotte controls Asia with bad chocolate!
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 5:38 am Post subject: |
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The US is in Iraq. The invasion was over a long time ago. They have no intention of leaving until a certain point.
What possible good can crying over spilt milk do?
Get on with life. Let's figure out a way to make like better for the Iraqi people. The old, 'no weapons of mass destruction' cry is outdated by almost a year now.
I just want life to get better for the Iraqi people. Terrorists killing children aren't helping, and neither are people who sit around with a burr up their ass over the WMD issue.
Respectfully, people like you don't give a damn about helping my fellow Muslims. You just want to win an argument. |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 6:19 am Post subject: |
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| BigBlackEquus wrote: |
The US is in Iraq. The invasion was over a long time ago. They have no intention of leaving until a certain point.
What possible good can crying over spilt milk do?
Get on with life. Let's figure out a way to make like better for the Iraqi people. The old, 'no weapons of mass destruction' cry is outdated by almost a year now.
I just want life to get better for the Iraqi people. Terrorists killing children aren't helping, and neither are people who sit around with a burr up their ass over the WMD issue.
Respectfully, people like you don't give a damn about helping my fellow Muslims. You just want to win an argument. |
Did you read the article? It wasn't about Iraq. It wasn't about Saddam. It was about the very overblown claims of what terrorists can/will do. It was about the very current and really stupid approach to dealing with terrorism, which is driven by fear being created by a government with an agenda. If the American electorate had known the truth, we'd have never been in Iraq. If they really understood the true degree of the threat vs. the huge amount of time, money and energy being spent to prevent the highly unlikely, a saner policy could be created because the current administration wouldn't be able to continue with their stupidity.
All this has a very direct bearing on whether Iraq is followed by Syria and Iran.
As for your last comment, respectfully, you're full of crap. |
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BigBlackEquus
Joined: 05 Jul 2005
Location: Lotte controls Asia with bad chocolate!
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 6:36 am Post subject: |
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| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| It wasn't about Saddam. It was about the very overblown claims of what terrorists can/will do. |
I would rather be full of crap and moving forward than sinking in a pool of it.
I suppose you would have, pre 9/11, called that event an overblown possiblity?
Now quit wasting my bandwidth. Your arguments are so bad, they bore me. |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2005 7:50 am Post subject: |
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| BigBlackEquus wrote: |
| EFLtrainer wrote: |
| It wasn't about Saddam. It was about the very overblown claims of what terrorists can/will do. |
I would rather be full of crap and moving forward than sinking in a pool of it.
I suppose you would have, pre 9/11, called that event an overblown possiblity?
Now quit wasting my bandwidth. Your arguments are so bad, they bore me. |
Is 9/11 an event related to WMDs????? Is it supposed to be an example of the use of fear to get people behind an immoral agenda??? 9/11 actually happened, it's not some boogeyman future event the goverment is trying to get us to imagine. How is it relevant in this thread?
You do realize you've not made a post on this thread yet that had anything to do with the content of the OP, don't you? It is bad form, and very immature, to jump into threads just to engage in self-serving little rants that are not relevant. |
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