Quote Originally Posted by El Kabong View Post
And again the MAIN point here is that the New York Times has now admitted that there WERE WMDs in Iraq and so Iraq War justification CHECK!

Anyone ready to admit that once again Lyle was right? When will you learn Kirkland? Mustard gas, nerve agents, and a leader who wanted to rekindle production of those weapons AND get nuclear weapons....a leader who used those weapons on the regular....but naaaah no need to remove Saddam. Sing yourself another lullaby Kirkland and chalk up another loss for yourself when it comes to debate.
No, the NYT haven't admitted that there were WMDs. You need to risk shelf overload and read more than the first few lines of articles. You should be able to manage at least one full newspaper article a day without suffering a shelf collapse/screw loose catastrophe.

That Iraq had artillery shells full of various chemical was known by all sides in 1992 when the weapons inspectors first went into Iraq. But artillery shells are not weapons of mass destruction. In the case of the shells discussed in the article, some of which were sold to Iraq by America, the worst destruction caused was somebody getting a big blister.


From your own fucking link:

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.




Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.


In September 2004, months after Sergeant Burns and Private Yandell picked up the leaking sarin shell, the American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.
The group, led by Charles A. Duelfer, a former United Nations official working for the Central Intelligence Agency, acknowledged that the American military had found old chemical ordnance: 12 artillery shells and 41 rocket warheads. It predicted that troops would find more.
The report also played down the dangers of the lingering weapons, stating that because their contents would have deteriorated, “any remaining chemical munitions in Iraq do not pose a militarily significant threat."


And so on.