Originally posted by Darth Thor
Scrap this. Just found a 2014 NYT article on it:I dont think this quite justifies what the intelligence promised though. Which was stock piles.
Like the article says, Bush and Cheney would have been all over this running it in.
The fact that you had to dig that hard and the fact that I knew the news company and the year the article was published should make you upset/scared. Why? Because the information is difficult to access through Google. The information is suppressed. We are not supposed to talk about it.
Those politicians were out of office for years, by that point. It doesn't matter. It was a quiet affair to release the WMD finds. And the finds happened over years, not just one find. Some of the finds happened during Bush Jr's white house tenure.
At the time when Bush Jr. needed those findings the most, it wasn't made available. It was used as a partisan talking point to smear the pro-war politicians (good) and the Republicans (because of the anti-GOP bias in the MSM).
Why didn't the GOP talk about it in the senate or the house? Surely this would have been a really big deal for the GOP, right?
Wrong.
The war was a bipartisan war. It was was a conspiracy (not a theory, an actual conspiracy) to revive the economy after the .com bust and to get revenge on something, anything, for the 9-11 attacks. Because the US Government was dependent upon big oil and the MIC (government military contracting companies) to stay in office, there was overwhelming support from the US oligarchy for a war that served many interests of the incumbent politicians. There's a MASSIVE amount of politicians that got fat off the foreign wars as either lobbyists for companies that pushed for the war or for their family members.
They go their war. The MSM's campaign to smear Bush Jr. and the GOP meant nothing to the people that mattered but did wonderful to create a massive amount of misinformation and ignorance in the American people.
Here are the elements of Powell's famous speech that is definitely and 100% true (but, IMO, still does not justify a war with Iraq):
Second, as with biological weapons, Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents.If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq War, UNMOVIC says the amount of chemical agent in them would be on the order of a thousand tons.
These quantities of chemical weapons are now unaccounted for. Dr. Blix has quipped that, "Mustard gas is not marmalade. You are supposed to know what you did with it." We believe Saddam Hussein knows what he did with it and he has not come clean with the international community.
To find this? You have to go all the way to the Department of State's archive.
https://2001-2009.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/17300.htm
That's exactly what we did find and more. The famous "recording" the Powell played of the Iraqi soldiers talking about destroying all evidence they had for these WMDs (not the WMDs themselves, just documentation such as inventory lists and locations) was also "doctored" to make the Iraqi soldiers appear to be more full of guile while executing Saddam's orders. But it still happened.
If we are to honestly represent what REALLY happened:
1. Everyone knew that Iraq still had massive amounts of WMDs still unaccounted for: both purposefully and accidentally.
2. Saddam may or may not have kept those under wraps to use at a future date against others - unconfirmed. Yes, he was still doing his ethnic cleansing and murder bullshit, though.
3. The WMDs may have been difficult to repurposed to use at large scale due to quality decay but it could still have been used by rebels or terrorist cells.
4. The MSM pretending like this was a GOP thing and a Bush fail because we "never" found WMDs when we found many over years.
5. This entire scenario has been kept very quiet and hardly anyone has talked about it. Almost no one knows about this. On purpose.
6. Saddam does not appear to have revamped efforts to renew secret WMD programs. That was a full 50% of Powell's argument.