Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Ok conservatives, George Will gets it.........

May I be the first to say that I think Jato and Dan Nixon have enough proper English dialect to write a textbook. Every time I read their posts I feel like I am studying up for a political debate! But it's fun to follow their posts and my compliments to their well researched and thought out points, though I may not agree with them all. Kudos to you, and to whoever was calling Kerry and Bush dumbasses and whatnot.. complete ignorance. I hope he was joking.

You are right on the training camp one in that Hussein couldn't do anything about it and this supposedly linking Hussein to Al-Qaeda was extraordinarily shaky, but there are a number of people calling BS on claims that the trailers didn't hold toxins at one point in time.

The Iraqi's "bleached" the Hell out of them by the time the US had a chance to make a grab at them. Wonder why they would do that?

Testing done on the trailers came back inconclusive as they were scrubbed down so well. Also, why were there fermentation units on the trailers that were found? Hydrogen production (these trailers were supposedly used to fill hydrogen artillery baloons) has next to NOTHING to do with fermentation...

There were initially labeled as pesticide units for crops; convienenly that same equipment can serve as a dual-purpose toxin "shop".

I'll take the known testimony of a number of Iraqi defectors/informants claiming the "dual-use" scenario that WITNESSED how things were being used, thank you very much.

You might want to read this.

"Powell said the "most dramatic'' of his allegations -- that Saddam Hussein's regime had mobile germ labs -- was based on questionable U.S. intelligence"

"Now it appears not to be the case that it was solid,'' he said.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/03/MNGJO609KQ1.DTL

I've read what the mainstream media has to say about this ad naseum. Notice he says "not solid". He doesn't say it was "false" information on the germ in ANY publication. Not solid means unsure, in that it fits the dual-purpose use category to a T.

If you remember, these trailers were being propped up as smoking guns on WMD activity in Iraq early on in the war. When they turned up "bleached" and cleaned of any contaminants, it all became circumstantial at that point.

You could haul hydrogen tanks to fill artillery ballons up on the back of a pickup truck or a small 2-wheeled trailer; you damn-sure don't need a trailer as large as the one they were using. You also don't need fermentation and lab equipment in these trailers, either.

Why was fermentation equipment on board, then? Don't ignore the question; answer it. Why were centerfuges found on some of these trailers as well? You don't need to spin hydrogen at any rate to use it...

The FACT is that everything had been scrubbed rather well and that no agents of any kind could be found. I seem to recall that apart from cleaning agents, baking soda and piss were pretty much the only two substances that could be determined from one of the examinations...

Why would someone go to the trouble of cleaning a hydrogen-hauling trailer if it didn't also act as a carrier for something else?

It still doesn't change the fact that a number of defectors/informers from different areas in Iraq had seperately described those type of trailers as being used as toxin labs.

We still don't have a smokin gun on them as no agents ever cropped up out of the one's we got our hands on.

Again, I'll trust Iraqi defectors/informers over someone selling press any day of the year. I'll aslo trust in the opinions of those who have been in Iraq and have done intel work for a living...

Here's some reading on those defectors to bring you up to date. They call themselves the Iraqi National Congress. In the future maybe you should gather information before you make your case. It can be embarassing if you don't.

"key intelligence on weapons of mass destruction provided by Chalabiâ??s group was false, perhaps even fabricated."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4855109/


"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraqi_National_Congress

The prisoner treatment frenzy is barely getting started, as the war college professors/military ethicists are just starting to weigh in and a mountain of facts have yet to be aired.

We still have the sovreignty change in a month and a half.

There's still time for things to get better for Bush. But that means there's still lots of time for things to get worse. (How many more PR disasters can Bush's re-election chances afford?)

And the mud-slinging by both parties will get even more ugly as November approaches.

Whoever wins will face a huge job in dealing with the political rifts and idealogical polarization now in place and getting wider among our citizens.

Arguing over everything on this board non-stop for the next 5 months likely does no one any good. How about we allow the events of the next several months to happen, and we let those events speak for themselves?