How do you know? If the trailers are a H[sub]2[/sub] production facility it is very likely they would have a steam reformer. You ever seen one of those? Didn’t think so. Also, it’s completely possible that they were using biomass as the feed in their hydrogen production. To do that you need a fermentor. Got that? There may have been fermetors in the trailers.
Now, I’m not saying that the American inspectors didn’t jump the gun, but before you jump to conclusions about what was in those trailers you should at least do some very basic research into what equipment is necessary to produce hydrogen.
Indeed. I wish that others (including members of the Bush Administration, and Bush himself) could keep it that simple, rather than trying to make declarations based on presupposed “facts.”
Then why did Bush claim they were? Don’t you think that was a little irresponsible of him to give us a big song and dance about how the WMD’s had finally been found?
Well, the CIA seems to have taken down the page giving the results of its analysis of the trailers (it was here), so you’ll have to look elsewhere for decent photos. However, the photos they did have of what they claimed to be a fermenter, were sadly missing all the usual fermenter paraphenalia I mentioned. As I described in this thread, the alleged fermenter looked a lot more like a medium scale chemical reaction chamber, such as steam reformer.
Ahh, FAS was good enough to keep a copy of the report, pix and all.
I wonder why the CIA took down their site. Couldn’t stand the heat ? :dubious:
I expected that, given scrutiny by others with a bit less bias than the US, this might be the conclusion. However, given the Guardian’s recent track record, I am hoping to see this reported somewhere else soon, and with a bit more supporting detail. Unless I missed it, the British weapons expert goes unnamed in the piece, and the information is said to have been given to the Guardian last week, although it is not clear when and why it is just being reported now. If anyone finds any other sources or evidence regarding inspections of these hydrogen facilities, please pass them along.
Sunday nights, the Usual Suspects get together at december’s house and watch old Ronald Reagan movies and analyze them for subtext and hidden messages.
Let me say that first off, regardless of what these trailers were used for, they cannot be shot through the air at the U.S. to disperse anthrax.
Therefore, no matter how you slice it, they are not WMD’s. At best, they’re part of a WMD program.
That being said, if that’s not a fermentor, then what was the truck used for?
To expand on the theme a little, basically a fermentor is a big, double-walled steel cylinder. You put some broth (basically yeast soup) inside it and run high-pressure, superheated steam between the two walls to superheat the broth and sterilize it. Then you open a port on the top and pour in some germs. The fermentor has a pump that will pump air through the broth, and some blades like a blender or laundry machine that will stir up the broth. After a while the germs reproduce from eating the broth, and then you drain the fermentor from a port in the bottom. A good fermentor also has extra ports for pH probes and the like, but whether you use them depends on how finicky the germs are. Usually these ports will have their own steam lines, and you sterilize them separately from the main body of the fermentor.
The thing in the picture doesn’t really look like a fermentor to me. It’s hard to tell from one photo, but it seems to be missing the window you would use to monitor the progress of the bacterial growth, ports for putting germs in and draining the broth, etc. It’s a little hard to believe that it could even be a custom-made absolute bare-bones fermentor (which would raise the question of why Saddam would settle for such a thing, anyway.)
I don’t know. It could be a bald lie, or it could be the result of bad or premature information. I don’t know enought to attribute motivations at this time.
IMHO, very few politicians would. And after what they’d have to say here to be honest, they’d get killed in the elections because their wiggle room’d be played out.
The weirder this whole affair gets, the more I wonder about another october surprise. This time it’d be the actual CBW of the Hussein regime. Of course, by December, (no pun intended very much), the report may have been discredited.
I just heard U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith being interviewed on the BBC. (For those who are unfamiliar with the BBC’s interviewing style, it’s extremely aggressive.)
The interviewer asked Feith whether the govt’s current info on WMD’s is accurate, since it comes from Iraqis who might just be telling the U.S. what it wants to hear. Feith explained at some length that one defector gave detailed diagrams of trailers that were part of Saddam’s WMD program, and those trailers have been found.
Later, the interviewer asked why the U.S. has found zero evidence of WMD’s. Feith again declared that the trailers were unequivocally part of a WMD program, and therefore they had already turned up evidence.
So, not only does Feith’s entire case hinge on the trailers, but even then he’s reduced to talking about the WMD program, instead of actual WMD’s.
