August Spies

from here

NEAR NAJAF, Iraq (AFP) - A facility near Baghdad that a US officer had claimed might finally be "smoking gun" evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons production turned out to contain pesticide, not sarin gas as originally thought.

:banghead:

Loren Pechtel

Many pesticides *ARE* nerve agents. Just ones far more dangerous to bugs than humans. A cross-reaction from a field test kit does *NOT* surprise me one bit.

LymanLover

I have to agree with Loren on this. I worked around pesticides for a while, and simply being around them made me sick as a dog. If they were dispersed in a warhead I'm sure they would have quite a negative impact on health.

OwnRules

As negative as The Mother of All Bombs? All 20,000 lbs of it? You know, the one that sucks all the air out of the lungs of people within a one mile radious.

I'll take my chances with pesticides, thank you very much. Or rather the odds of Iraq attacking my country with them as opposed to...oh the US coming to 'liberate' us with massive ordinance drops.

yaktldg

xi-theses, if that (insecticide warheads) were even a remote possibility, surely it'd be made a 'smoking gun'. The threat has been dismissed.

LymanLover

OwnRules: No, I was simply stating my experience with pesticides.. I am against this war.

The post probably didn't make much sense, but I have been out on the piss.

LymanLover

gqtie: I'm sure they aren't nearly as deadly as chemical weapons... but who knows? DDT. Agent Orange. Etc. There were all pesticides.. Maybe the iraqis tried to weaponize some form of pesticide... I'm sure there are some dangerous chemicals out there that would do the job if deployed in bulk..

OwnRules

Fair enough.

It's just that I've heard enough hypocrisy throughout the making of this murderous invasion to last me for ten lifetimes -- and then some.

[Oops--looked like a double post. After killing the second one I realized they weren't quite the same, the second was actually a corrected version of the first. Since the words were still on my screen I pasted the contents of the second into the first message.]

Automaton

Un-fucking-believable. Pesticides, even cholinesterase inhibiting organophosphates (note: related to sarin, VX, and other well-known nerve gasses), are not chemical weapons, regardless of whether or not you think there would be "detrimental health effects" as a result of their use as a payload in a long-range warhead, because then such compounds would be classified as such in the international pharmacological lexicon. And then it would actually be illegal under international law for Iraq to have this, which it is now not. Case closed - the thing this proves is that coalition officials are trying desperately to find what they knew was there all along. I mean Saddam probably does still have WMD, but this action is ridiculous.

LymanLover

OwnRules: I agree..

Automaton: I agree with that as well.. but that doesn't mean scientists (any scientist, any nation, trying to find some form of destructive weapon..) at some point might try to weaponize them.. But even if something isn't classified as a chemical weapon doesn't necessarily mean it can't be used as one... Like I said, I worked in a factory for about three weeks and got sick as a dog handling normal pesticides, like roundup and malthon.. I was not trying to take a moral position on the war or apologize for U.S. actions, simply state a few what might be helpful facts.. all which I grant could be clouded by the good time I had tonight.

lesson: don't post when drunk