'nerve Gas Bomb' Explodes In Iraq

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'Nerve gas bomb' explodes in Iraq


An artillery shell containing a small amount of the nerve gas sarin has exploded in Iraq.

Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt said the blast had caused a small release of the substance and two people had been treated for exposure to the agent.

The substance was found in a shell inside a bag discovered by a US convoy a few days ago, he said.

It appears to be the first evidence of nerve gas existing in Iraq since the start of the US-led war last year.

'Limited effect'

Gen Kimmitt said the dispersal of the nerve agent from a device such as the homemade bomb was "limited".

"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," he said.

However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.

He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

Sarin is a toxic nerve gas 20 times as deadly as cyanide.

A drop the size of a pin-head can kill a person by effectively crippling their nervous system.

The gas is one of a group of nerve agents invented by German scientists in the 1930s as part of Adolf Hitler's preparations for World War II.

Although the Germans never released sarin in battle, it was used to lethal effect by Iraq during the 1980s both in the war against Iran and against the Kurds.

After the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors found large quantities of sarin in production at an Iraqi chemical weapons plant.

The Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, also used the nerve agent in a Tokyo subway in 1995, in which 12 people died.

Source - BBC News

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Now call me an old cynic but this is a timely piece of news, just when the US needs some good publicity to come out of the Iraq debacle.

I don't need to point out that since the fall of Saddam 12 months ago, the country has been overrun by foreigners, and this could have come from anywhere... Doubtless in the near future an analysis of this sample will indicate that it came from Saddams supposedly destroyed stocks, and more larger samples will now come to light, yadda yadda yadda... Do you think some people actually still exist who DO believe something a politician says?

So there you go, Blair and Bush were right after all, and we can now all sleep soundly in our beds... :unsure:

EDIT: Story updated.

;) Ohhh do not worry.Somebody will come along and say that Bush Planted it. :rolleyes:

:P

This is timely but it has nothing to do with the prison scandal and has everything to do with June 30 drawing nearer. The terrorist and insurgents are getting desperate now because we are winning the war and the handover of power back to the Iraqi people is a month away. They've tried everything else to beat us but they haven't succeeded so now they are going to resort to this. This is the first case and I fully expect to see a lot more of this as we get closer to June 30.

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Originally posted by FuNkY CaPrIcOrN@17 May 2004 - 17:51
;) Ohhh do not worry.Somebody will come along and say that Bush Planted it. :rolleyes:

:P

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They've already faked going to the moon, carried out Perl Harbor, killed princess Diana so I'm sure "governmental agents" can stretch to a bit of sarin in a bomb :unsure:

This sarin may have com in from outside or may have just been stockpiled by some Iraqis and then sold to the terrorists carrying out these attacks.

Sorry but that "story" means squat!!!!

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Originally posted by Busyman@17 May 2004 - 12:14
Sorry but that "story" means squat!!!!

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Why because it proves that you might have been wrong all along?

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank+17 May 2004 - 13:15--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (BigBank_Hank @ 17 May 2004 - 13:15)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Busyman@17 May 2004 - 12:14
Sorry but that "story" means squat&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;

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Why because it proves that you might have been wrong all along? [/b][/quote]
No offense Hank but you slap Bush&#39;s balls at any chance.

A hint of Sarin in an artillary shell in a country overun by non-Iraqis and you are ready to jump on the WMD bandwagon.

Don&#39;t get me wrong, first and foremost I am American. If Bush really turns out to be right about the WMD&#39;s then I&#39;d be the first to back him. (on that at least <_< )

The difference is I am critical of any politician. I do not blindly follow a person who, to my knowledge, hasn&#39;t done one single good thing of note in his entire tenure as President.

That smacks of ineffectiveness in any future presidency.

I haven&#39;t made the I told you so post about WMD&#39;s because this is just one case. I think that there is much more of this to come the closer we get to the handover of power. The insurgents are losing and they&#39;re getting desperate. They tried just about everything to get us to pull out of there and nothing has worked, so now they&#39;re resorting to this.

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank@17 May 2004 - 13:43
I haven&#39;t made the I told you so post about WMD&#39;s because this is just one case. I think that there is much more of this to come the closer we get to the handover of power. The insurgents are losing and they&#39;re getting desperate. They tried just about everything to get us to pull out of there and nothing has worked, so now they&#39;re resorting to this.

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Alot of these "insurgents" are pouring in from other countries. There&#39;s no way to prove the weapons are Iraqi native.

I think that there is much more of this to come the closer we get to the election. :lol: :lol: :lol:

Nice try though. Thanks for coming.

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Originally posted by Busyman@17 May 2004 - 17:48
I think that there is much more of this to come the closer we get to the election. :lol: :lol: :lol:

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:lol: seeing a pattern about to emerge? :P

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Originally posted by Busyman@17 May 2004 - 12:48
I think that there is much more of this to come the closer we get to the election. :lol: :lol: :lol:

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I&#39;m sure you also think that the military has also captured Bin Laden and that Bush is waiting to use that until its almost election time <_<

News Update:

It also seems that Mustard Gas was also found at a different location.

hank

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However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.

He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

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we are still finding unexploded munitions from WW11, including land and sea mines, grenades and bombs that failed to detonate on impact. It would be almost impossible to account for every single round of ammunition that iraq ever had, it&#39;s not as if these things are the size of a cruise missile.
Nobody here has denied that saddam has had weapons...we sold most of them to him in the first place... but to find the odd remnant of such weapons and use that as proof of his danger at the time we invaded would be scraping the barrel. It&#39;s hardly the threat to world peace we have been told it might be.

personally i think the world is more dangerous now than it was before we invaded. This opinion has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the decision to invade and everything to do with the side effects that have resulted. Iraq is now and even after the handover will be more unstable than it has been for a long long time and even if you agree with the reasons for invading it cannot be denied that the instability is a direct result.

Mustard Gas and Sarin are both technologies that are over 70 years old. The number of rounds used in the 80s Iran/Iraq war was huge - as was the number that failed to detonate etc.,. There will still be caches of these weapons probably unmarked and definitely deteriorating on the original battlefields. They will be a hazard in the future for whoever runs the country.

Their existence is irrelevant to the arguments put forward that Saddam was developing a modern long range capability that threatened the West. The supposed reason for the war.

The shell used formed part of an improvised bomb and was not delivered as originally intended, via artillery. It looks more like insurgents simply cobbling together bombs out of whatever they find. This is only worrying if they suddenly realise what they have done and have found a stock pile of these shells somewhere. If they let a lot off together in a crowded place they might do damage - although it is difficult to control artillery shells in that sort of way.

What is remarkable is not that this has happened, but that after a year of intensive searching this is the first Iran/Iraq chemical shell to re-appear. What is certain is that if the insurgents are playing around with badly maintained 30 year old shells they are as liable to kill themselves as anyone else.

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After the Gulf War, United Nations inspectors found large quantities of sarin in production at an Iraqi chemical weapons plant.

A senior coalition source said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

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As we found upon entering Iraq, there are old ammunition stashes all over the country. To me the quote above pretty much sums it up, this is not a significant finding.

edit: Biggles posted while I was typing and so I add.... "what he said".

I think it was a marine after a curry dinner myself

@vidcc: I&#39;m not making this out to be the I told you so about the WMD&#39;s. I said it earlier that this is one shell that has been found and its not a widespread finding.

I&#39;m just thankful that whoever was set this explosive up didn&#39;t use it properly because the result would have been much worse. It was a 155 mm artillery shell that needed to fired for the chemicals to mix properly. This could have turned out much worse.

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank@17 May 2004 - 13:06
This is timely but it has nothing to do with the prison scandal and has everything to do with June 30 drawing nearer. The terrorist and insurgents are getting desperate now because we are winning the war and the handover of power back to the Iraqi people is a month away. They&#39;ve tried everything else to beat us but they haven&#39;t succeeded so now they are going to resort to this. This is the first case and I fully expect to see a lot more of this as we get closer to June 30.

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Why would they be desperate anyway?

It would seem they just want to be disruptive.

I would think it easier to kick ass once American soldiers leave.

Desperate to make us leave before we hand over things to the Iraqi&#39;s. They&#39;ll try anything to get us to just up and leave and it aint happening.

And if you think that after we hand over control we&#39;ll be pulling out your mistaken. They is still a lot of work to be done there and we have to provide security to make sure things go smoothly. We can&#39;t just leave them with no means of protecting themselves from attacks.

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The substance was found in a shell inside a bag discovered by a US convoy a few days ago

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If it was found by a US convoy, how did it then fall into the hands of insurgents who managed to detonate it? :blink:

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank@17 May 2004 - 16:07
Desperate to make us leave before we hand over things to the Iraqi&#39;s. They&#39;ll try anything to get us to just up and leave and it aint happening.

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"us"? are you currently enlisted and stationed in iraq? awesome. got get &#39;um, g.i. joe. ;)







also, a bit of light reading on a WMD/chemical tangent. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...939624187.html

“My job isn&#39;t to assess the government&#39;s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers what the government thought of Iraq&#39;s arsenal.” -- New York Times reporter Judith Miller

by Miller&#39;s reasoning, the press is completely unnecessary since its job is just to report whatever its sources (the government, exiles who stand to gain from a war, etc) tell it, rather than to report the truth. disgusting. we may as well just eliminate the middlemen and get our &#39;ganda directly.

I don&#39;t think the people over at The New Yorker would agree with Judith Miller&#39;s description of her job&#33;

This kinda makes you wonder why the insurgents don&#39;t just relax for six weeks until the hand over. Then they can create chaos for a newly established government that doesn&#39;t have a grip on what it&#39;s doing yet and being more effective, rather that going up against the already established US administration.

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Originally posted by Alex H@17 May 2004 - 22:41
I don&#39;t think the people over at The New Yorker would agree with Judith Miller&#39;s description of her job&#33;

This kinda makes you wonder why the insurgents don&#39;t just relax for six weeks until the hand over. Then they can create chaos for a newly established government that doesn&#39;t have a grip on what it&#39;s doing yet and being more effective, rather that going up against the already established US administration.

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uh yeah...I..I..said that.

i think the inherent dishonesty of many journalists is that they claim they&#39;re being purely objective, by simply reporting the fact that someone says such-and-such. the idea is that they&#39;re not taking sides. but by selecting which people&#39;s statements to report, without giving serious consideration to the opposing viewpoint or to the allegiances/motives of their sources, they do take sides.

for example: if an exiles&#39; organization makes wild accusations against Saddam Hussein, do you report their statements without comment, or is it appropriate to point out that they might be making such claims because they personally stand to profit from a regime change?

I don&#39;t mind when reporters take sides as long as it in the opinions section of the newspaper. That&#39;s not the case at the New York Times their opinions section is on the front page.

The speculation here is unbelievable. We could get together and write a brand new episode of the x-files with this stuff. Great Material. ;)

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank@18 May 2004 - 00:29
I don&#39;t mind when reporters take sides as long as it in the opinions section of the newspaper. That&#39;s not the case at the New York Times their opinions section is on the front page.

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I don&#39;t mind when reporters take sides as long as it&#39;s my side they take.
:lol: :lol: :lol:

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Originally posted by 3RA1N1AC+17 May 2004 - 19:46--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (3RA1N1AC @ 17 May 2004 - 19:46)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-BigBank_Hank@17 May 2004 - 16:07
Desperate to make us leave before we hand over things to the Iraqi&#39;s. They&#39;ll try anything to get us to just up and leave and it aint happening.

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"us"? are you currently enlisted and stationed in iraq? awesome. got get &#39;um, g.i. joe. ;) [/b][/quote]
"us"= America
myself = American

Although I may not be in the battlefield firing bullets Americans at home are paying for the war. I&#39;m paying taxes that are paying for bullets,bombs,food, ect. for the troops.

Hank

I think the concern in the ME is that the Coalition have plans never to leave. Given the sheer number of people that support one group or another, will we ever be in a position to say that the country is secure?

We could create a strong Iraqi military only to see it control the country when we leave. After all, many of the Ba&#39;athist senior officers are re-appearing on the scene with our blessing. Will we care if they do run the country - if they are pro-West as Saddam was in the 80s?

Will the "moderate Shi&#39;ites leaders turn out to less moderate than we thought after the elections?

These and many other tricky questions remain to be answered. :)

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Originally posted by BigBank_Hank@18 May 2004 - 08:54
Although I may not be in the battlefield firing bullets Americans at home are paying for the war. I&#39;m paying taxes that are paying for bullets,bombs,food, ect. for the troops.

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okay... did you volunteer your dollars, or were they drafted? my tax dollars are thinking of dodging the draft by hiding out in canada.

actually, the tax money we&#39;ve already paid has nothing to worry about. that money wasn&#39;t spent on the invasion/occupation/reconstruction. the u.s. couldn&#39;t actually afford to start a war, so it did what any red-blooded american would do: put that shit on the credit card and go into debt. and if you have to leave a pile of bills for your children to pay after you die, well then AIN&#39;T THAT A SHAME LOLZ.

Correct me if i&#39;m wrong, but didn&#39;t we supply the bomb&#39;s and bullets to Saddams regime, the same ones being used against us now. If it wasn&#39;t for your taxes this whole episode would never have started.

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Originally posted by 3RA1N1AC+18 May 2004 - 16:38--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (3RA1N1AC @ 18 May 2004 - 16:38)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-BigBank_Hank@18 May 2004 - 08:54
Although I may not be in the battlefield firing bullets Americans at home are paying for the war. I&#39;m paying taxes that are paying for bullets,bombs,food, ect. for the troops.

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okay... did you volunteer your dollars, or were they drafted? my tax dollars are thinking of dodging the draft by hiding out in canada.
[/b][/quote]
You better plan on moving to Canada because the IRS far less forgiving than any military force out there.

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Originally posted by clunk1234567@19 May 2004 - 01:06
Correct me if i&#39;m wrong, but didn&#39;t we supply the bomb&#39;s and bullets to Saddams regime, the same ones being used against us now. If it wasn&#39;t for your taxes this whole episode would never have started.

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It&#39;s a funny old world, innit&#33; ;)