Saddam's WMD Found - in NYC

Is America safer, as Bush says? You decide.

Exhibit A: Chemical weapon scare causes U.N. evacuation

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- A U.N. office was evacuated after workers found vials that may have contained the poison gas phosgene Thursday.

U.N. archivists unexpectedly turned up samples of material from an Iraqi chemical weapons plant in weapons inspectors' files dating back to the 1990s, but the substance is not believed to pose any immediate danger, U.N. officials said Thursday.

The material was taken from al-Muthanna chemical weapons plant north of Baghdad. The samples are sealed and have been there since 1996, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

Whoops.

Exhibit B: Audit finds U.S. nuclear weapons parts misplaced

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some facilities that handle the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile misplaced classified bomb components under their care, according to an Energy Department audit.

The department's Inspector General also found there was confusion at the facilities over who was responsible for keeping track of weapons parts and recommended changes in how to better safeguard the parts.

John Broehm, a spokesman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration that oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, said his agency disagreed with the recommendations.

He said the parts, which he declined to identify, were later found.

Right. What's the point of agreeing with recommendations to tighten things up? Heckuva job there, Mr Broehm. It's not like they've had that many security concerns there, after all.

Exhibit C: Meanwhile, these actual acts of domestic terrorism are getting very little press, FBI Investigates String of Store Threats. If this was happening in my country, I think I'd like to know about it.

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) -- Large grocery and discount stores across the country have been targeted by a caller who threatens to blow up shoppers and workers with a bomb if employees fail to wire money to an account overseas, authorities said.

Frightened workers have wired thousands of dollars - and in one case took off their clothes - to placate a caller who said he was watching them but may have been thousands of miles away. The FBI and police said Wednesday they are investigating similar bomb threats at more than 15 stores in at least 11 states - all in the past week.

"At this point, there's enough similarities that we think it's potentially one person or one group," FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said from Washington.

No one has been arrested, no bombs have been found, and no one has been hurt, though the calls have triggered store evacuations and prompted lengthy sweeps by police and bomb squads.
[...]
Separately, the FBI is looking into bomb threats on college campuses, including two in Ohio - the University of Akron and Kenyon College. No explosive devices have been found. Law enforcement officials said there was no evidence at this time linking the college bomb threats with those at grocery and discount stores.

Kenyon, in Gambier in central Ohio, received six separate bomb threats in a general admissions e-mail account between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Wednesday, college spokesman Shawn Presley said. Local and federal authorities determined the threats to be a hoax and the school was not evacuated as officials swept buildings searching for the bomb, he said.

Of course, the lesson in all of this is obviously that Iran should be your number one security concern because Bush says so. Just ignore all of the rest of this trivial stuff. Nothing to see there, folks.

Oh, and speaking of Iran: Iran atom work at slow pace and not significant: IAEA.

Priorities people. Priorities.
 

Guess what? Iraq Didn't Have WMD

Yes, I know that may come as a big surprise to half of Americans polled last year (yes - half), but the US and Russian governments have finally decided to state the obvious:

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.S. and Russia have agreed to dismantle the U.N. agency that searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and affirm that Saddam Hussein's government had no such arms at the time of the American invasion in March 2003.

The Security Council will adopt a resolution the last week in June to close the U.N. Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission, created in 1999 to search Iraq for biological and chemical weapons, Belgian and British diplomats said. The measure will also end the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency's mandate to look for nuclear arms in Iraq.

U.N. inspectors found no banned weapons before or since the invasion.

Feisal al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy ambassador to the U.N., said his country is "still dealing with the residue of having been a pariah state" and called the resolution a "huge symbolic step that will show we are taking steps forward to be reintegrated in the community of nations."

He said adopting the U.S.-drafted resolution would be a prelude to lifting all U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq during Saddam's reign.

So, despite the fact that the US illegally invaded Iraq and has had control of it for years now while democratically-held elections took place, the country is still under sanctions? Sanctions, by the way, have a habit of causing humanitarian nightmares.

And not only that:

Iraq has complained about paying $50 million since the invasion to maintain the agency, known as UNMOVIC. The agency, which withdrew the inspectors before the war, employs 34 people and prepares quarterly reports to the Security Council.

The Iraqi people have been ripped off in so many ways by the Bush administration's lies, with the biggest theft (besides the hundreds of thousands of lives lost) coming down the pike via the proposed oil law, that the entire disaster is practically beyond comprehension. Then again, I'm not an imperialistic warmonger raking in the profits so maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time seeing this as anything but one huge war crime.