There have been several threads of late that call Bush a liar about using Weapons of Mass Destruction as the basis for attacking Iraq. Some threads even dabated the possibility of impeachment. Some threads call to question why hasnt there been any WoMD found yet. And the biggest eyeball-roller of all are all those false alarms about finding posiible evidence of this and that only to come out as a false alarm.
Taken individually, it does prosper a doubt in the presidents motives. However, i just realized something (other than the fact that its been only a couple of weeks that the search for WoMD has been intense). We are getting a lot of false alarms on a lot of sites. There were a thousand sites that intelligence has determined are high probable areas to find WoMD and as they are being investigated, the locals are voluntarily giving more probable sites to be investigated. So far, all are false alarms, but all tested positive to begin with.
Now follow me on this. Before the war, all of these intelligence data was gathered secretly and from the outside. Whether by informant or intercepted documentation or secret testing, all were determined to be highly suspicious. These were the sites that were supposed to be inspected by Blix and associates but were coming up false. Why are there so many of these suspicious sites? Why were the Iraq regime hiding these sites even if they would turn up false? Why are these sites testing positive preliminarily and then coming up false under further scrutiny? Its not that these things are coming up false but their number. If there no WoMD, we shouldnt be finding false ones either at least not this many in just a few weeks.
In the old shell game, you have a ball and there are 3 shells. The trick is to find the ball in the right shell but it is constantly moved around and thats only if the game is legit. Some games, all 3 shells are empty. In a con game, only one shell is opened to reveal no ball. A legit game would show the ball after a missed try. These false alarms are the shells. If the inspectors find a shell, they would test false and mark a ding on intelligence data. Eventually, no one would believe the data being given to the inspectors thru all the false alarms.
I submit that this may prove to be an opportunity of plausible deniability for the president shrub. Since there are a lot of false alarms, he can say with credibility that his intelligence may have overstated the WoMD threat. Given the uncooperative nature of Saddam and all of the sites that needed to be verified, it would be put on Saddams shoulders that this war was initiated and since we may not have anything but his DNA, he wont be defending himself or his regime. I dont believe the Iraqi people will be giving Saddam a 100 percent approval anytime soon. Shrub can say he didnt lie, but was misinformed and he decided to err on the side of safety for the American people.
Because Iraq society uses chemicals, like any other modern society. The pesticides in my garage would turn up positive for possible chemical agents. Can you explain why the garages or chemical plants of Iraq should be any different, or why anyone but the extreme paranoid fringe would find the number of such sites in a country the size of California to be suspicious ?
okay. I’ll explain why Iraq garages and chemical plants would be different from finding pesticide chemicals in any other modern country if you can explain why these pesticide chemicals are found near munitions and missiles.
while youre at it, maybe you can explain why you need a mobile laboratory to make pesticides and why bury it in sand along with hundreds of thounsands of dollars worth of equipment if youre not using it?
BTW, I dont know what the heck you have in your garage and what kind of insects are prowling around your neighborhood but the stuff in my garage is never going to false positively test for nerve gas.
A false positive is a false positive. The fact that there are a number of false positive isn’t the same as finding even ONE ACTUAL positive, which still hasn’t happened. If this is what you’re relying on to prove Iraq had chemical weapons, the argument is pretty screwed. I’m pretty sure Bush used the shell-game analogy, actually, and he certainly used the same idea: it was said that the inspectors were being spied upon, were infiltrated by Iraqi agents, were talking to agents posing as scientists… a lot of allegations along those lines, but none were ever backed up by anything.
Some of it did, though spinning it (usually by omitting details) was common. But some of the intelligence stated the threat for what it was: negligible. Bush went out there are said for dead certain not just that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, but said or strongly implied it had HUGE amounts and had the intent and capability to use it. And he continued to harp on the nuclear threat even after the two pieces of evidence that propped the accusation up - the aluminum tubes and the Niger yellow-cake documents - were found to be complete bullshit. If people decide he’s been dishonest, there’s really no way out. That’s why the arguments shifted so much; because in case nothing was found in the way of weapons, extra justifications (freedom for the Iraqis, peace in Israel) had to exist.
X-Slayer. According to this New York Times article (free registration may be required), the barrels found are NOT chemical weapons (again):
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As far as those chemicals in your garage, of course, they could have false positives. The equipment the soldiers have only look for specific chemical signatures, not weapons themselves. As long as that pesticide in your garage has one of those chemicals (precursors?) you would get a false alarm.
Incidentally, it took me less than 1 minute to find this article using Google. Anyone could have done the same.
no no no you dont understand. I am not offering the number of false positives as proof of the existance of WoMD. What I am suggesting is that all of the False positives will give Bush a credible excuse if no WoMD are ever found.
Bush can say that given the intelligence reports and data that he had prior to the war, there was good reason to suspect that Saddam had WoMD and that he was hiding something. Since the US wasnt allowed to check those suspected sites first hand and Saddam wasnt cooperating fully, this war was actually Saddam’s fault.
For all we know, Saddam could have been no more than a great big Toxic waste dumper. Still not good news for the common Iraqi people but not really as bad as builder of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
“What I am suggesting is that all of the False positives will give Bush a credible excuse if no WoMD are ever found.”
Well, I doubt he’s dumb enough to directly use it as an excuse. The admin may just keep repeating that they are looking into suspicious sites and let the media highlight every episode that sounds good. The admin and the press will slowly stop talking about it and in 2 years the public will only remember how “suspicious” Iraq was and that there were so many possible stories one of them musta been real.
(who’ll remember, we’ll be at war with Syria- No time for history lessons! ).
well yah I probably have that…IF I had A hundred acres of infested plants to treat! California regulates those things for farm use only. My dinky little patch of crabgrass isnt going to need industrial strength highly toxic neurogens to control bugs with.
Altho I will accept that that these things were found in agricultural areas to be a viable rationale. So what are they growing in these farms? Missile-tow?
“well yah I probably have that…IF I had A hundred acres of infested plants to treat! California regulates those things for farm use only.”
Do you have a cite for that? IANAChemist but it seems that Cholinesterase Inhibitors are used in a wide range of products. A specific one ,Chlorpyrifos, was only recently banned in 2000:
The fact remains that Saddam was willing to forego hundreds of billions of dollars due to sanctions and let his country be bombed willy-nilly rather than allow weapons inspectors free reign in his country. He was certainly hiding something.
Maybe he just didn’t want the coalition to find his extension collection of porn.
In all probability, nothing more will be required. The Bushistas have already laid the foundation for a long and fruitless search. That way, they win if they dont find anything, 'cause they just say they’re still looking. Sooner or later, something draws the attention away, the people go back to sleep.
Of course, the Bushistas line reflects Sam’s: there must be something! There just has to be something!
So they figure poke thier nose around long enough, they find something, and then say “Yep, that’s where we thought it was!”
And all this time, $250,000 is just sitting there on a table in a tent in Baghdad: first guy through the door to rat out one of Saddams massive stockpiles of Nasty gets the cash. Gotta be hundreds of people, given the massive nature of the stockpiles, who know how to find at least one.
And yet no one shows up to claim the cash. I think that’s decidedly odd.
Just FYI, but I recall reading in one of the major news outlets (either the Associated Press or the Los Angeles Times, can’t remember) that the reason the U.s. troops’ initial tests come up with so many false positives is because they’re designed to err on the side of caution. E.g., if that barrel over there has something suspicious in it, better to report a false positive and scare the troops into taking all precautions than the alternative.
Or, in other words, lots of false positives don’t mean anything.
As is oft forgotten, the chances of a single positive test being an actual true positive are NOT based solely on the accuracy rate of test. It is also contingent on 1) the true percentage of actual positives in the population of things being tested and 2) the size of the population of things being tested. Basically, that means that even with an extremely accurate test (say, 99% accurate), the chances of any given positive test truly being positive are actually counter-intuitively low when the ratio of true positives is low compared the number of tests being done. That, then, is why it is to be expected that there will be many cases in which initial positive tests turn out to be false alarms. Lots of tests are being done, and chances are that far far more tests are being done than there are actual WMD in the population of things being tested.
Of course Apos it is also true that if you are testing for something that does not exist, but which you never claimed to be anything but very hard to find, you can just go on offering the excuse that a true positive is going to be rare for more or less forever (forever in the public mind being a couple months till everyone’s forgotten about the issue) and the fact that you never come up with a single true positive will be lost in all the talk about positives [sub]that, just quietly, turn out to be false[/sub]
You gotta get more into the despotic ruler mindset, Sam.
Any number of despots will gladly put their people through the seven rings of hell for their own sake. Dictators who are rolling in gold while their country lies in economic ruin are two a penny. You can bet Saddam never missed a meal due to sanctions and that he gave not a damn for starving children.
And ultimately, he never gave up, never stepped down, even as US forces were on the outskirts of Baghdad and it was obvious that his country was going to be laid bare to inspectors, like it or not.
So the suggestion that he was motivated by a desire purely to hide WMD just doesn’t hold water.
Who the fuck knows what drives the mind of someone like Saddam, but you cannot apply logic as you attempt to do.
Bush and his team and their arselicking camp followers (hello Johnny Howard) are very very careful never to even acknowledge the possibility that there may be no WMD and always carefully phrase their comments so that the existence of WMD is the unstated assumption.
Either they have very clear evidence (but if they had that, they’d have revealed it long ago) or they are spinning like tops, and I know which my money is on. But I am also quite certain that the average joe takes on board Bush’s unstated assumption (that WMD exist) to a much greater extent than joe would take on board the real doubts put forward by doves and sceptics and other suspicious and untrustworthy characters.
A quarter of a million dollars. Just sitting there. All a guy’s gotta do is walk in and say “The warehouse full of nuclear anthrax nerve gas is at 2256 Saddam Blvd.” No more calls, we have a winner.
Now, we know, do we not, Usual Suspects, that there are massive stockpiles of such in Iraq. Our Leader has said so, has super duper secret intelligence. Of course, really super duper intelligence comes from more than one source, confirming its super-duperness. All of these sources affirm absitively and posolutely that these nasty WMD’s exist, in “massive stockpiles”, yet not one can tell us where they are.
Must be at least a hundred guys who can rat out these locations. Out of that number, not one steps forward to claim the boodle. Not one.
Because they are all so intensely loyal to Saddam’s memory, they will not stain his legacy by ratting him out for mere money? Seems unlikely. Iraqis just don’t like money? Please.
Help me out here, Usual Suspects. After all this time, why hasn’t at least one knowledgeable snitch stepped forward to grab the goodies? What previously unknown principle of human motivation is at work here?
The one I keep coming back to is nobody is selling the information because no one has anything to sell. I’m sure you guys have a much better explanation, since you are so much smarter than me, and all. How come nobody has claimed the money? Phone should be ringing off the hook at CIA. Ought to be a line a block long outside that tent in Baghdad, don’t you think? Walk in, rat out, badabing, you’re rich.
And yet…no takers. Kindly explain this extraordinary fact. Take your time.
There’s a million bucks out there for anyone who can dowse or prove they are psychic, elucidator. No one’s ever claimed the money. Many have tried. All have failed.
Belief in psychics and dowsers is not hard to find. Indeed it would seem if anything to be growing.
Don’t hold your breath for your logic to be something that many people find convincing.
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