History Forum / General / British History / June 2006

Dont read your own posts very well do you Hiney:
".. The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they
would not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s.."

Look Hiney, if you are going to be a liar in a league with Bush you
have to start insulting people for being sight impaired and get an
assistant who shoots his party members in the face while drunk.

"Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq"

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Fox News

"WASHINGTON - The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since
2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two
Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons,"
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late
Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground
Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said:
"Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons
munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many
efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled
and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

He added that the report warns about the hazards that the chemical
weapons could still pose to coalition troops in Iraq.

"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many
factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and
environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical
warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from
the document.

"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state
that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from
the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra,
R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.  ******

The weapons are thought to be manufactured before 1991 so they would
not be proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s.  But they do show that
Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it
shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover
these munitions.

Hoekstra said the report, completed in April but only declassified
now, shows that "there is still a lot about Iraq that we don't fully
understand."

Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the
information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra
conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on
the development of a secure government in Iraq.

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense
Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in
useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the
official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the
rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country
went to war."

The official said the findings did raise questions about the years of
weapons inspections that had not resulted in locating the fairly sizeable
stash of chemical weapons. And he noted that it may say something about
Hussein's intent and desire. The report does suggest that some of the
weapons were likely put on the black market and may have been used outside
Iraq.

He also said that the Defense Department statement shortly after the
March 2003 invasion saying that "we had all known weapons facilities
secured," has proven itself to be untrue.

"It turned out the whole country was an ammo dump," he said, adding
that on more than one occasion, a conventional weapons site has been
uncovered and chemical weapons have been discovered mixed within them.

Hoekstra and Santorum lamented that Americans were given the
impression after a 16-month search conducted by the Iraq Survey Group that
the evidence of continuing research and development of weapons of mass
destruction was insignificant. But the National Ground Intelligence Center
took up where the ISG left off when it completed its report in November
2004, and in the process of collecting intelligence for the purpose of force
protection for soldiers and sailors still on the ground in Iraq, has shown
that the weapons inspections were incomplete, they and others have said.

"We know it was there, in place, it just wasn't operative when inspectors
got there after the war, but we know what the inspectors found from talking
with the scientists in Iraq that it could have been cranked up immediately,
and that's what Saddam had planned to do if the sanctions against Iraq had
halted and they were certainly headed in that direction," said Fred Barnes,
editor of The Weekly Standard and a FOX News contributor.  ******

"It is significant.  Perhaps, the administration just, they think they
weathered the debate over WMD being found there immediately and don't want
to return to it again because things are otherwise going better for them,
and then, I think, there's mindless resistance to releasing any classified
documents from Iraq," Barnes said.

The release of the declassified materials comes as the Senate debates
Democratic proposals to create a timetable for U.S. troops to withdraw from
Iraq. The debate has had the effect of creating disunity among Democrats, a
majority of whom shrunk Wednesday from an amendment proposed by Sen. John
Kerry of Massachusetts to have troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraq
by the middle of next year.

Hilarious!  They "shrunk" indeed.  -- DSH

At the same time, congressional Republicans have stayed highly united,
rallying around a White House that has seen successes in the last couple
weeks, first with the death of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the
completion of the formation of Iraq's Cabinet and then the announcement
Tuesday that another key Al Qaeda in Iraq leader, "religious emir" Mansour
Suleiman Mansour Khalifi al-Mashhadani, or Sheik Mansour, was also killed in
a U.S. airstrike.  ******

Bingo! -- DSH

Santorum pointed out that during Wednesday's debate, several Senate
Democrats said that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, a
claim, he said, that the declassified document proves is untrue.

Yep, they lied.  -- DSH

"This is an incredibly - in my mind - significant finding. The idea
that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side
of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact
false," he said.

As a result of this new information, under the aegis of his chairmanship,
Hoekstra said he is going to ask for more reporting by the various
intelligence agencies about weapons of mass destruction.

"We are working on the declassification of the report.  We are going to
do a thorough search of what additional reports exist in the intelligence
community.  And we are going to put additional pressure on the Department of
Defense and the folks in Iraq to more fully pursue a complete investigation
of what existed in Iraq before the war," Hoekstra said."

"FOX News' Jim Angle and Sharon Kehnemui Liss contributed to this report."
--------------------------------------------

Pogues on the run.

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Fortem Posce Animum

url for the "reprt"

http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Iraq_WMD_Declassified.pdf

no virginia we didn't

500 filled and unfilled artillery shells.

what ratio ? 1 filled 499 not?  santorum is a well known nut from the
extreme jesus wing of the republican party.

it was only repoted by hannity and colmes.  a very "credible" source.

of it was true anyway true they would be screaming it from every belfrey.

time for one of your pratfalls hindquaters

and maybe a kerwhomp or two.

Shocking Information WMD (Poison Gas) found in US Near Capitol -
Coverup Exposed!:

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma04vilensky

headline:

The dew of death
U.S. war planners knew lewisite was not suited for battlefield use, yet
vast quantities of the agent were produced, saddling the government
with a large, ongoing cleanup.

By Joel A. Vilensky and Pandy R. Sinish
March/April 2004  pp. 54-60 (vol. 60, no. 02) © 2004 Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists

or years now, the Army Corps of Engineers has been digging up and
removing contaminated soil and buried World War I-era poison gas
munitions in Spring Valley, a well-to-do Washington, D.C. neighborhood.
[See Jonathan Tucker's "Chemical Weapons: Buried in the Backyard,"
September/October 2001 Bulletin.]

This massive $91 million cleanup project continues, and one of the
thorns plaguing the effort is the residue of what is believed to be the
most toxic agent of the era, an arsenic-based compound called
lewisite--the "dew of death." To date, 140 of 1,600 residences and
businesses near Washington's American University, where chemical
weapons research was conducted, have been found to have arsenic levels
higher than 20 parts per million, requiring the removal and replacement
of the upper two feet of soil from their properties. On September 3,
2003, the Corps announced that a sealed vial containing about a
tablespoon of lewisite had just been excavated. Small as this find was,
it heightened residents' fears because it was discovered in what was
believed to be a "low-priority" area. Residents wonder how much more
lewisite is still buried in their yards.

It is ironic, given the enormous commitment of resources devoted to the
manufacture of lewisite in this country and others--and the equally
enormous price tag for cleanup--that the compound's history is riddled
with questions about why it was produced in the first place. Its
usefulness as a weapon of mass destruction was rightfully questioned
from the beginning.

Early days
Another irony of lewisite's history is its initial discovery in 1903 by
a priest pursuing doctoral work at Catholic University of America, in
Washington, D.C. Julius Aloysius Nieuwland was studying the reactions
of acetylene when he combined it with arsenic trichloride in the
presence of aluminum chloride, causing a toxic compound to form
(dichloro-2-chlorovinyl arsine). Nieuw-land described the reaction in
his thesis and then went on to an illustrious career at the University
of Notre Dame.

Nieuwland's discovery was ignored until 1917, when a Chemical Warfare
Service research unit was established at Catholic University. The
unit's director, Winford Lee Lewis, whose assignment was to develop an
arsenic-based poison gas to counter the German success with mustard
gas, was drawn to Nieuwland's work. Lewis's unit purified Nieuwland's
compound and sent it for testing to the Chemical Warfare Service's main
research campus at American University.

Animal and human testing at American convinced chemical weapons
researchers that lewisite was the Allied answer to German successes in
the development of more and more toxic agents. With lewisite, either
inhalation or skin contact caused death--and less than a teaspoon was
thought sufficient to kill a man.

Eventually, the equivalent of $60 million in today's dollars was spent
to build a secret plant in Willoughby, Ohio, where lewisite could be
manufactured by the ton. By the time the war ended in November 1918,
the plant was producing about 10 tons a day.

What made the Chemical Warfare Service's commitment to lewisite
curious, however, is that its analysis appeared to ignore some very
basic chemistry. Lewisite hydrolyzes--breaks down--when it comes into
contact with water, even water vapor. And although the Chemical Warfare
Service believed in 1918 that it had scooped the Germans by developing
lewisite, in actuality, German chemists had considered lewisite the
year before and rejected it--because of hydrolysis.

Were the Germans wrong and the Americans right, or vice versa? There is
no doubt that American chemists knew how rapidly lewisite hydrolyzes.
Maybe they didn't think it was an issue--the compound appeared very
effective when tested on animals (although not under battlefield
conditions). Or perhaps the development, production, and hype about
lewisite was partly a matter of prestige. Did the Americans need to
show the other Allies that they could compete in the chemical warfare
game? The United States did tell its allies that lewisite had great
potential as a chemical warfare agent, and Britain, at least, started
planning its own manufacturing facility.

James Bryant Conant was the chemist in charge of lewisite production
during World War I. During World War II, Conant chaired the National
Defense Research Council and in that role oversaw U.S. military
research in both chemical and atomic weapons. About his work during
World War I, Conant writes in his autobiography that he later learned
there were "many doubts as to whether lewisite was, in fact,
effective."

But if he did believe those doubts, why did he permit lewisite research
to continue during World War II? And Conant did more than permit the
research to continue--he was instrumental in the U.S. adoption of an
improved manufacturing technique developed by the British.

Consistent with Conant's autobiography, however, a 1918 Chemical
Warfare Service report on lewisite concluded that "little effect should
be expected" from lewisite vapor. The report indicated that most troops
were by then equipped with gas masks, and unlike its toxicity as a
liquid, lewisite vapor had low skin toxicity and did not penetrate
clothing easily. At the same time, the report suggested that hydrolysis
was not an issue because the compounds that formed after its chemical
reaction with water were still toxic and effective in contaminating the
surrounding environment.

The report concluded that the pain and blisters resulting from direct
contact with contaminated material, and perhaps the respiratory and
ocular effects on unmasked troops, would give lewisite an advantage
over mustard. In the end, the report was contradictory in its
assessment of lewisite's military value.

Between the wars
After World War I, the public was inundated with popular press articles
touting American prowess in the development of the dew of death. Both
the New York Times and the Washington Post reported on May 25, 1919
that lewisite was the "deadliest poison ever known." The Times
described how two airplanes carrying lewisite could have wiped out
"every vestige of life--animal and vegetable--in Berlin. A single day's
output would snuff out the millions of lives on Manhattan Island."

On June 15, 1919, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an article describing
how methyl (a code name for lewisite) would have killed half the German
army because it was 72 times as toxic as mustard gas. Harper's Magazine
declared in 1919 that lewisite belonged at the top of all the American
inventions in the war effort; it was "the most powerful weapon of war
ever wielded." In 1922, lewisite even appeared in a serialized short
story, "The Slayer of Souls," published in the Chicago Herald and
Examiner. According to a 1925 New York Times story, lewisite was
purportedly put into bank vaults to prevent robberies.

During the interwar period, lewisite's value as a chemical warfare
agent continued to be debated and evaluated, based both on limited
testing and theory. A 1923 Chemical Warfare Service report described
the difficulty of developing sufficiently toxic concentrations of
vapor. Thirteen years later, the service indicated in a classified
publication, A Handbook of Chemical Warfare Agents, that lewisite "is
useful in cold frozen countries and in hot very dry countries; i.e.,
where hydrolysis is of little importance," perhaps suggesting that the
service did not believe it was valuable in temperate climates. The
document also indicated that one of the products of the hydrolysis
reaction, lewisite oxide, would contaminate an area for a long time
because it was still highly toxic and vesicant (caused severe
blisters), did not evaporate, and was not washed away by rain.

The debate pertaining to the effectiveness of lewisite also appeared in
publicly available books written by military personnel who had access
to classified data. In 1925, The Medical Aspects of Chemical Warfare by
Lt. Col. Edward B. Veddar indicated that because of lewisite's tendency
to hydrolyze, sufficient vapor levels to produce casualties would be
unattainable. Maj. Gen. M. W. Ireland, then the U.S. surgeon general,
wrote in his 1926 book, Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare (volume 14 of
The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War),
that although hydrolysis might impede lewisite's effectiveness, after
some had been hydrolyzed by moisture on the skin, successive droplets
would penetrate and cause injury. Lt. Col. Augustin M. Prentiss, in his
1937 book Chemicals in War, said that lewisite was effective even after
hydrolysis because the products of hydrolysis were toxic. Prentiss also
claimed that most battlefields would be dry enough.

Some information on lewisite's potential also appeared in literature
outside the United States. Heinz Liepman's Death From the Skies was
published in Germany in 1937. The book described an "eyewitness"
account of a man entering a room containing an imperceptible amount of
lewisite vapor. The man is quickly seized with violent pains and
uncontrollable vomiting; four days later, suffers from chronic
arsenical dermatitis and nervous breakdown; and dies from lewisite
poisoning three months after exposure.

On the other hand, in 1931, in his book, Green and Yellow Cross, German
physician-scientist Hermann Büscher described his experiments testing
mustard gas and lewisite on human skin. Büscher, who used an impure
form of lewisite, found its effects to be less serious and less painful
than those of mustard. And another German author, Ulrich Müller, wrote
in 1932 in Die chemische Waffe (The Chemical Weapon) that if the Allies
had used lewisite in World War I, they would have been greatly
disappointed.

World War II
When World War II began, the Chemical Warfare Service had,
surprisingly, not developed any new chemical warfare agents. The old
standards from the first war, including lewisite, were resurrected, and
23,000 tons of lewisite were manufactured at three U.S. military
factories. Lewisite was tested both under restricted and battlefield
conditions. Tens of thousands of soldiers "volunteered" for these tests
and were exposed to lewisite. The long-term consequences of these tests
were compiled by the Institute of Medicine in 1993 in Veterans at Risk:
The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite. The report definitively
linked lewisite exposure to respiratory illnesses and concluded it was
possibly associated with ocular diseases, cancer, and immune system
dysfunction. [See also, "The VA's Sorry, the Army's Silent," March 1993
Bulletin.]

Considering the doubts raised about the battlefield effectiveness of
lewisite during the interwar years, the decision to renew its
production and testing at the beginning of the war seems open to
question.

Curt Wachtel, a German who had migrated to the United States, had
evaluated lewisite for the German military in 1918. Wachtel published
Chemical Warfare in 1941, in which he described lewisite as having
little to offer on the battlefield. He wrote in the foreword that he
hoped his knowledge would be "helpful to the military of his adopted
country."

Unfortunately, no one in the Chemical Warfare Service appears to have
paid any attention to Wachtel's book or to their own reports.

Lewisite testing and production may have been initiated because it was
feared that the Axis powers might use it. If that was what the leaders
of the Chemical Warfare Service were thinking, they were right--in
part.

Despite numerous allegations that Adolf Hitler's Germany would produce
lewisite, there is no credible evidence that it was ever in that
country's chemical arsenal. Apparently, German chemists trusted the
evaluations done earlier by their World War I counterparts.

In contrast, though, Japan did make and use lewisite. In 1929, Japan
secretly built a plant on Okunojima, where it manufactured lewisite and
other chemical agents. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and began using
biological and chemical weapons, including lewisite, on thousands of
soldiers and defenseless Chinese civilians. Approximately 10,000 people
were killed in gas attacks.

Between 700,000 (a Japanese estimate) and 2 million (a Chinese
estimate) abandoned Japanese chemical munitions remain in China today.
Numerous casualties and deaths (estimated at about 2,000) have resulted
from accidental discoveries of these munitions. In 2000, the Chinese
and Japanese governments agreed to a 10-year cleanup project to destroy
the remaining munitions.

In most cases, Japanese chemical shells were filled with a lewisite/
mustard mixture. Why combine the two? One reason is that the two
compounds have somewhat different effects--lewisite causes immediate
pain and blister formation and has much greater systemic toxicity than
mustard, but mustard achieves higher vapor concentrations. The mixture
potentially combines the most toxic effects of each agent. However,
after the war, Japanese officers testified that the reason lewisite was
added to mustard was that it made the mustard usable at lower
temperatures (as in Manchuria). Mustard normally freezes at 55-59
degrees Fahrenheit; lewisite at 0.

U.S. testing of lewisite during World War II revealed that although
vaporized lewisite may reach high concentrations immediately after an
explosion, its spatial range is small, perhaps no larger than that of
an explosive shell. Similarly, vapor sprayed from an airplane was found
to be transient. World War II-era reports on lewisite also indicated
that soil contaminated with lewisite releases vapor that is odorous,
but not injurious. The results of 11 tests indicated that lewisite
would only be effective as a direct, liquid contaminant.

Human field tests conducted by the United States showed that unless a
soldier was defenseless or unconscious, the rapid pain and eye
irritation and the geranium-like odor associated with lewisite
compelled him to move out of the area immediately. Because of
hydrolysis, only ineffective vapor concentrations could be achieved.

Once the Chemical Warfare Service concluded that lewisite would not
work under battlefield conditions, production was suspended on November
8, 1943. However, stockpiles of lewisite were maintained as a
supplement to mustard to "confuse and harass the enemy." After the war
ended, the National Defense Research Council's summary report
pertaining to lewisite declared that because the British had developed
an effective antidote in 1941, and because it was likely that the
antidote would become available to other countries in the future,
"there seems little likelihood that there will ever be any incentive
for the use of lewisite as a chemical warfare agent."

After 1943, the U.S. military seems to have finally accepted its own
evaluations and not produced lewisite, except in small quantities for
testing and identification purposes. In 1948 the vast majority of the
20,000 tons produced during World War II were dumped into the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans in "Operation Geranium." An unknown quantity is
stored in one-ton containers at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah
(since 9/11, data on the exact amount is no longer available to the
public). ... (cont)

In soc.history.medieval D. Spencer Hines <poguemidden@hotmail.com> wrote:

[...]

Fox News cheats and lies.  Most of us know that.  Hines doesn't.

Here's something to chew on...

************ begin included material ****************

Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie.

By Mike Gaddy  (Published 28-Feb-2003)

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing
illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press
organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of
journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television
management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false
information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against
any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a
television broadcast.

On August 18, 2000, a six-person jury was unanimous in its conclusion that
Akre was indeed fired for threatening to report the station's pressure to
broadcast what jurors decided was "a false, distorted, or slanted" story
about the widespread use of growth hormone in dairy cows. The court did not
dispute the heart of Akre's claim, that Fox pressured her to broadcast a
false story to protect the broadcaster from having to defend the truth in
court, as well as suffer the ire of irate advertisers.

Fox argued from the first, and failed on three separate occasions, in front
of three different judges, to have the case tossed out on the grounds there
is no hard, fast, and written rule against deliberate distortion of the
news. The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdock, argued
the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately
distort news reports on the public airwaves.

In its six-page written decision, the Court of Appeals held that the
Federal Communications Commission position against news distortion is
only a "policy," not a promulgated law, rule, or regulation.

Fox aired a report after the ruling saying it was "totally vindicated"
by the verdict.

http://www.sierratimes.com/03/02/28/arpubmg022803.htm

Copyright 2003 SierraTimes.com

********************* end included material ***************

So Fox News won a court case on the grounds that they are
not required to report the truth and that in fact, they
don't.

   ---- Paul J. Gans