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| Iraq-Jordan | |||||
| Sarin Confirmed! | |||||
| 2004-05-25 | |||||
Comprehensive testing has confirmed the presence of the chemical weapon sarin in the remains of a roadside bomb discovered this month in Baghdad, a defense official said Tuesday. The determination, made by a laboratory in the United States that the official would not identify, verifies what earlier, less-thorough field tests had found: the bomb was made from an artillery shell designed to disperse the deadly nerve agent on the battlefield.
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| Posted by:Frank G |
| #34 Fred: I know a lot of the eastern-bloc artillery was 152mm, but Iraq had a large amount of 155mm artillery tubes, from I think South Africa and Austria, that had been originally designed by Gerald Bull. He did a lot of consulting for the Iraqi government in the years before his death. |
| Posted by: Phil Fraering 2004-05-26 12:07:33 AM |
| #33 Soviet-era artillery, and presumably Russian, featured a 152-mm round. I'm not sure what the equivalent Chinese caliber is. Given the general sloppiness in reporting of military matters, I'm not even sure the round was a 155... |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-05-25 11:50:59 PM |
| #32 My preferred exit strategy is via the Med through Syria and Lebanon. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2004-05-25 10:54:45 PM |
| #31 I have a question for the army guys out there, would you feel comforable calling for a fire mission if you new your arties might have unmarked sarin rounds in their ammo dump? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-05-25 10:48:51 PM |
| #30 We have an exit strategy. It's called military victory. Complete and total, badanov! Accept nothing less! IslamoFascism delenda est. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-25 9:59:24 PM |
| #29 Back to the shell, indeed RMcLeod! Thank you. My gut tells me that this is the tip of the iceberg. The sheer volume of shells will put an additional danger of demolition of these munitions to personnel and civilians in the area. Perhaps something can be done by x-ray or other non-self-destructive means of examining the munitions before making a Big Mess™. My 2 cents on trolls. Guys and gals, quit using your brain cells in composition and pouring your hearts out on trolls. Ignore them. Let the Troll Professionals on RB remove the hazmat. Save our intellect for WoT issues. It will take all we have to meet the threats. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2004-05-25 9:32:28 PM |
| #28 The 155mm Artillery shell is also a NATO round. Meaning France, Germany and even the US use a similar round. There's been a lot of talk on the origins of the shell http://www.overpressure.com/archives/week_2004_05_23.html#000831 |
| Posted by: Anon666 2004-05-25 9:08:42 PM |
| #27 Back to the shell. I too have read reports that this particular shell was of post-1995 vintage. The lack of markings is strongly suggestive of the probability that Saddam had many more of these unmarked shells (you don't buy 155 mm chem shells one at a time.) And who manufactured such a shell? Not the Iraqis, I'll wager. My guess is that it came from China or Russia, Saddam's primary weapons suppliers. As one writer put it, finding this shell is like finding a spoon on Mars. It raises many, many questions. |
| Posted by: RMcLeod 2004-05-25 8:31:26 PM |
| #26 Many thanks, everyone. I must admit, however, that I didn't originate it, or not most of it, anyway. I figured that since our trolls have never had an original thought in their lives, there was no need to roast them with original flames. I stole most of it from Free Republic, interestingly enough, considering the scorn heaped on that worthy resource in lefty circles. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-05-25 8:03:41 PM |
| #25 AC: Outstanding full-throttle rant. And so without further hesitation - I'll drink to that! |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2004-05-25 8:00:42 PM |
| #24 Jen, whenever I hear a democrat complain about the lack of an exit strategy, I tell them: We have an exit strategy. It's called military victory. |
| Posted by: badanov 2004-05-25 7:52:08 PM |
| #23 Fred: It's time for a deception plan. You sould create "Trollburg." Once someone has been ID'ed as a troll, they automatically get redirected to Trollburg. It's the same as Rantburg. They can see all the comments and post their own, but we on Rantburg can't see their comments! Eventually, they get tired of being ignored and leave none the wiser. You save bandwidth. They get to troll. And we get spared their stupidity. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-05-25 7:49:12 PM |
| #22 Wow works for me, too, Frank. Awesome, AC. Simply awesome! That be the Rant of The Year, methinks, not to mention Truth Incarnate! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-05-25 7:47:29 PM |
| #21 wow |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-25 7:42:01 PM |
| #20 I'll seconded that. |
| Posted by: Daniel King 2004-05-25 7:36:44 PM |
| #19 Troll-biter: You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. You are a disgusting piece of filth, incapable of honor. You are so vile that not even a lawyer would consent to sexual congress with you under any circumstances. Nay, even your right hand shuns such congress with you. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-05-25 7:32:54 PM |
| #18 Hey...maybe you have to have a king-sized mullet to be a troll!!! |
| Posted by: anymouse 2004-05-25 7:24:52 PM |
| #17 Ima say Damn! That Fred is ruthless! No room on this blog! LOL Fred slaps troll with wet mullet. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-05-25 7:05:42 PM |
| #16 Jen - I've meant to say this before, but this serves as an excellent place and time to do it: Thank You! DBT (and his other nyms) and ilk have wasted a LOT of Fred's bandwidth and RB'ers time - I used to care, a LOT, but the regular appearance of mindless tool screeching assholes like him have caused me to walk away from regular commenting, much less seeking out stories for posting... This new breed of troll, being utterly irrational, utterly without substance, and pointlessly disruptive, has often made the debate seem a waste of time to me. I'll get over it, I guess, but there it is. But you haven't wavered or thrown your hands up, even once. You rock! Keep taking your vitamins and kicking troll-butt! And Thanx, again! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-05-25 6:59:39 PM |
| #15 I'm with Jen on this. This is a war for the soul of the Western world, and the WoT is just one of several fronts. The real enemy is the tranzi PC quasi-marxist moral-equivalence liars and distorters found in the media and the UN. |
| Posted by: Phil B 2004-05-25 6:59:33 PM |
| #14 "several military officials have said the shell may have been an older one that predated the 1991 Gulf War" And other military blokes on the blogs have made a well-detailed point that the round was most likely manufactured post-1995. I think those "military officials" had better come up with evidence to support their blind assertions. |
| Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive 2004-05-25 6:56:03 PM |
| #13 Good one (as usual), Dotcom. Believe it or not, I hate the politics as much as Fred, but the hard, cold truth of the matter is that the Left has completely politicized the WOT (as they did to get us to give up in Vietnam) and we're now fighting a 2-front war: The "real" war overseas with soldiers and the Culture/Political War (or War of the Memes) here at home on the web, on TV, on the radio and in the papers. Time to grit our teeth and continue fighting a long, hard slog until at least the election. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-25 6:48:07 PM |
| #12 DBT is purest troll and pure screecher. Not one of its posts has contributed anything, anything at all, to any debate, whether political or otherwise, much less the WoT. It's just a troll with no Rantbergian redeeming value. Period. IMO, you should ban it; like Boris - it sucks like an F5. 8^[ |
| Posted by: .com 2004-05-25 6:43:23 PM |
| #11 Rantburg is here for reporting and discussion on the War on Terror. I was reluctant to allow political posts, despite the fact that for the most part I agree with everything George Bush has done, with the exceptions of negotiating with the thugs at Fallujah. You're entitled to your opinion of Mr. Bush, just as I am, but this isn't a political weblog. If you've got nothing to say about the War on Terror, don't say it here. You're taking up bandwidth that could be used for more important things. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-05-25 6:20:08 PM |
| #10 Stockpiles of WMD that the Marines will discover the Saturday before the Democrat Convention starts. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-25 6:16:19 PM |
| #9 Re #2,3. The left and media spin has already been that STOCKPILES of weapons haven't been found. |
| Posted by: Stephen 2004-05-25 6:14:39 PM |
| #8 Fred Pruitt and Mike Sylvestor: Respectfully, admit your doubts. Bush is delivering Iraq to Iran. Fred, you go first. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-05-25 6:09:44 PM |
| #7 Is it me, or is DBT starting to sound more and more like our old friend Boris? |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2004-05-25 6:08:01 PM |
| #6 DBT, are you one of those people who thrives on agitating people? who says "let's you and him fight?" Your comments only tangentially address the articles under consideratoin and are primed to tempt people into unrelated discussions. Any intelligent idea you might wish to express is usually about 20dB below the noise level of your post and not worth trying to dig out. |
| Posted by: RWV 2004-05-25 6:04:36 PM |
| #5 Bullshit, DBT. Pure Bullsit. As SecDef Rumsfeld said, "That's just not going to happen." President Bush is a Christian, not a Muslim, in case you weren't paying attention, which you clearly aren't, but he clearly keeps his Faith and the state separate. If it doesn't fit your agenda, you tune it out. You sound like a Buchananite with your Crusader/anti-Crusader mentality. |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-25 5:59:34 PM |
| #4 So the gloves are off against the Wahabi and Khomeni garbage in Iraq? Hardly! Not with "faith based" Bush running the show. Read why he should be shoved into a corner with his "holy ghost": http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vppin253818048may25,0,5541776.column?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines Fred Pruitt and Mike Sylvestor: Respectfully, admit your doubts. Bush is delivering Iraq to Iran. |
| Posted by: Dog Bites Trolls 2004-05-25 5:48:27 PM |
| #3 It's the headline at Drudge, so it'll be hard to miss. That's where I caught it |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-25 5:36:50 PM |
| #2 Some trace elements of mustard agent, an older type of chemical weapon, were detected in an artillery shell found in a Baghdad street this month, U.S. officials said previously. The shell also was believed to be from one of Saddam's old stockpiles. I'm amazed that this is even being reported... but I won't be surprised if it's downplayed. |
| Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-05-25 5:33:47 PM |
| #1 Gee, I wonder where that came from??????? |
| Posted by: cheaderhead 2004-05-25 5:24:59 PM |