A long and winding road to get home, today. I rode the train, despite the train threat. From there, I tried to make public transportation in the DC suburbs work. It doesn't, not on the weekend.

I get here and my ISP has some DNS issues, and I can't get to about three quarters of the sites I want to link to. So I'll get on it tomorrow.

Here in Boston, big news on the front page of the Globe and the Herald, is that John Kerry may not accept the nomination at the Democratic convention in order to play some money games. Boston is very upset about the shutdown of the streets that will accompany the convention. If it will all be for nothing, that may make them angry, but it isn't like Mass is going to go for Bush.

Look for Mickey Kaus to make more of this.

Have to catch a train shortly, and will be out of touch with the net for a little. (Note to Amtrak - would have paid the extra $50 for Acela if the 80211b was on there!) So just a quick note.

I haven't found anything in the UNSCOM reports to back up what Ritter's article says. Reader AMac in the comments has done some pretty extensive review of the docs and doesn't turn up anything, either. Also, Ritter does not mention any dates of the program, and it is obviously a different program of binary shells than those referred to in the 1996 UNSCOM document of shells excavated at the weapons production facility, since Ritter says all of the ones he is writing about were either non-chemical testers or fired downrange.

Leads to an interesting conclusion that I will take some time on and post later tonight.

Also, the other issue I have - all of these questions are not really mysteries. The answers to all of them are known - they are just not public. Meanwhile, we are wallowing in Abu Ghraib. The administration, the CPA, the ISG - should be out front providing these answers. And since they aren't, the press should be hounding them to find them out.

Had some time to think while driving today about Ritter's article, and I'm afraid it raises more questions than it answers. If Iraq had this technology, why did UNSCOM never report it, and why did Ritter himself, in 2000, pooh pooh the idea that Iraq had anything like it? From the details that Ritter provides, I know that he knows what he is talking about. Where is the documentation, the supporting proof? Ritter said that he passed information to the United States while with UNSCOM - why did the DoD still report Iraq's crude binary system in 1998?

Another piece that raises some suspicions is when he writes "To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired." But we know that EOD techs were on site. They are not untrained eyes. They probably know whether that is a fired or unfired round, and it doesn't require forensic analysis.

Then there is this - if what Ritter writes about the existence of the rounds is true, then both Blix and Kay know for a fact that these are not leftovers from the Iran-Iraq war. The rounds Ritter describes are part of a development program, not deployed systems. Why are they saying that this is "probably" a leftover from then?

It also doesn't let the LA Times off the hook for deliberately distorting what BG Kimmitt said.

More questions than answers.

In the comments, someone points to an article in Christian Science Monitor where Scott Ritter has answered the one question. And the answer is...YES. This type of binary, mix in flight shell has been recorded in Iraq before. (since noone else has even asked the question he is answering, I have to wonder - is Scott Ritter reading this blog?)

The key to whether the sarin artillery round came from an arms cache or was a derelict dud rests in the physical characteristics of the shell. The artillery shells in question were fitted with two aluminum cannisters separated by a rupture disk. The two precursor chemicals for the kind of sarin associated with this shell were stored separately in these containers. The thrust of the shell being fired was designed to cause the liquid in the forward cannister to press back and break the rupture disk, whereupon the rotation of the shell as it headed downrange would mix the two precursors together, creating sarin. Upon impact with the ground - or in the air, if a timed fuse was used - a burster charge would break the shell, releasing the sarin gas.

Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining. The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.

What gives away whether the shell had been fired is the base-bleed charge, which unlike the rest of the shell, will show evidence of being fired (or not). Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production. Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors. And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur. So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.

Here's your shocker - Ritter is right in his analysis above. Of course, for the round in question to be a dud, the rupture disk had to fail and the fuzing had to fail, but that is not impossible. Of course, it then calls into question his denial that there was mix-in-flight binary capability in Iraq in that 2000 interview, and the other UNSCOM reports and the DOD analysis.

By the way, the "base bleed" he writes of uses a low explosive charge at the base of the shell to burn off slowly, which extends the range of flight of the artillery shell. Yes, if that was expended, it would be a fired round. Chances are, the answer to this is already known. That is something that the EOD techs onsite should have checked.

In short, Ritter provides evidence that it is possible for this to be from a previous declared weapon system. The questions he asks are good ones. The answers to those questions would settle it.

That's all we really need, here. For one reporter to ask BG Kimmitt, or Charles Duelfer, or David Kay, or Hans Blix:

Has this type of binary chemical round that mixes the components in flight been discovered and recorded in Iraq before.

That's it - the one question. Of course we'll need an answer. Obviously, if the answer is yes, then I've been wrong all along - and I am sure that whoever answers can point to the evidence of this type of weapon in Iraq before. If the answer is no, then the ball is rolling.

That's it. One question.

In the comments, someone who posted as "Tom" points to an UNSCOM report that includes the following:

59. Iraq has also admitted the development of prototypes of binary sarin-filled artillery shells, 122 mm rockets and aerial bombs. However, the new documentation shows production in quantities well beyond prototype levels. Iraq has also admitted three flight tests of long-range missiles with chemical warheads, including one, in April 1990, with sarin.

So Iraq did admit to having binary artillery shells - this obviously led to the recovery of them described in the UNSCOM report in the post below. That still leaves the question of the crude binary versus "mix-in-flight." Scott Ritter certainly has his credibility issues, but his recounting of the binary system that Iraq used is backed up by other UNSCOM reports (PDF) and in 1998, the Department of Defense (PDF) described the Iraqi binary weapons this way:

The Iraqis had a small number of bastardized binary munitions in which some unfortunate individual was to pour one ingredient into the other from a Jerry can prior to use.

and

The Russians have been publicly accused by dissidents within their own agencies of developing new binary agents, and the Iraqis are known to have constructed binary bombs and missile warheads, albeit with crude manual mixing of the reactants.

As I wrote - we aren't going to Google this thing and get the answer. Someone needs to ask the questions - and someone needs to answer.

I've had several posts on this topic, and it has gotten significant notice in the blogosphere. But given the nature of blogging, permalinks, etc., there is a little disjointedness, so I want to recap what I've posted.

First, the shell was announced by BG Kimmitt, the CPA military spokesman, and he was reporting an announcement by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). During the press conference, he said (and I am paraphrasing! See other comments for the inside joke) that the round was an old binary shell, and described its function - two components contained within the shell that are mixed by the action of firing the shell, and that since the shell wasn't fired, but used in an IED, the mixing was not complete, only a small amount of sarin was produced, and a couple of soldiers (EOD) were affected. Field testing showed sarin, and not said by BG Kimmitt but later reported, higher level testing confirmed it.

This is a significant announcement, yes, because it is a chemical round, but more importantly, because of the technology it uses. That is the use of cells or canisters of separate components that mix in flight to create the sarin. This is big news because the Iraqis were not known to have this technology prior to the Gulf War. Yes, they had sarin. And yes, they did use binary chemicals (and a note, here, on something I missed before - the Iraqis never declared binary artillery shells, but UNSCOM did find some in 1996), but as this interview with Scott Ritter - yes, that Scott Ritter - conducted in 2000 shows that the technology was crude - it was not "mix in flight":

BRG: They were also using very crude binary munitions.

Ritter: They called them “binary,” but what that meant was that they had a warhead full of isopropyl alcohol and at the last second they mixed in the difluor. [32]

BRG: “Mix-in-flight.”

Ritter: It’s not even “mix-in-flight.” They mix it before they launch. [33] At the Muthana State Establishment, which was responsible for developing Iraq’s chemical weapons, whenever they would mix these things Iraqi workers would get up there and then pour the agent in and stir the Sarin by hand in the warhead. Invariably there’s an accident and you’ve got guys writhing, convulsing and dying because of the nerve agent. The Iraqis killed more of their own people loading the chemical agent into the warhead than they did with the warheads themselves.

The Iraqis didn't use binary because it was safer, obviously. They did it because of shelf life. As I understand it, Iraq had a problem with their production that made their sarin ineffective after 3 weeks. So they used this crude binary so it wouldn't sit and degrade. If this was a unitary sarin round from pre-Gulf War days, it wouldn't have had any effect on the soldiers.

In short, this type of artillery shell is one that the Iraqis never declared, and the UN inspection teams on the ground never discovered. It introduces something entirely new into the WMD story of Iraq. Here is the nub - this type of weapon has never been found in or attributed to Iraq before, where did this one come from? This isn't quite an airplane in King Tut's tomb, but it is highly significant. Was it produced in Iraq right under the noses of the inspection regime? Was it purchased from outside in violation of UN sanctions? Did it come in from some outside country after the fall of Hussein? I don't know the answer to those questions, but whatever the answer, it changes the narrative of the WMD story in Iraq.

Or it should. While this has gotten a lot of notice in the blogosphere, there is nothing moving in the mainstream media. Why is that? Some of the reason is that the mainstream media quite obviously are uninterested in changing the narrative. That the LA Times fabricates the assignment of the production of this weapon to the 1980's is a sign of that - BG Kimmitt never said it, yet the LA Times writes that he did. This is having the desired effect, in the comments over at Washington Monthly's blog (Kevin Drum's deal), some one writes "General Kimmitt claimed that the ordinance was of Gulf War vintage, meaning that the bomb had to be at least 13 years old." No, he didn't say that at all about the ordnance (ahem). So how did that notion get in this guy's head? I'm guessing from reading a story in the LA Times or the like that has decided not to spin this one, but to simply print untruths. Noone ever goes back to check the primary sources, right?

pittspilot raises some good questions below, and probably the one that is most poignant is this: If blaster picked it up, and it would require someone with a background to understand the implications at first, then surely others will know as well. That is a good question - the easiest answer is to say, hey look, this is some random internet guy, what does he know? I think I've provided firm documentation of what I am saying, though. I may have a head start on what to look for because of the training and studying I did on Iraqi munitions in 1990, but surely Blix and Kay know that this is significant. And surely the US government does, too. Why aren't they trumpeting this find as vindication?

This, too, is a very good question. But notice a couple of things. When it was first announced, some administration people were surprised because they thought the information was classified (I know, World Net Daily, but that is how I first heard it reported on network radio, too). And it wasn't until this was announced that the administration also announced that a mustard filled shell was found 2 weeks ago. As Instapundit wrote the other day:

It's hard and -- as various bizarre news stories seem to indicate -- we're in a situation where it's likely that lots of stuff is going on beneath the surface that we don't and can't know about. Add to that the tendency of the media reporting from Iraq to focus on superficially bad news, at the expense of both good news and non-superficial bad news, and it's really hard to tell what's going on.

What does that mean? It means that there is a lot more going on than we are going to know - more than what the "open sources" tell us. We aren't going to find the answer to Iraqi WMD with Google. I've heard some surprising things from people who know more than open source. If what I've heard is true, there is a whole lot more that we have yet to find out. And this is also important - both President Bush and Tony Blair stand by their WMD claims from before the war. Still.

I have some guesses at what the larger picture might be, but it still seems kind of strange that probably the most damaging thing to the war effort right now is the lack of credibility arising from the "failure" to find WMD in Iraq. It is curious, and exasperating, that apparently every "find" is dismissed.

Blix and Kay are both dismissing this round as pre-Gulf War - when clearly it cannot be. And I don't buy the "we got burned on yellowcake" so we are being superduper cautious on anything else theory, because in the end, even Joe Wilson admits that was right.

So I would like to see the questions pittspilot raises asked, and answered. You don't have to be an ordnance technician to figure out what they are - he's got it right. Now if only our press were more interested in this than in damaging President Bush.

To the 9/11 Commission, and Rudolph Giuliani did:

Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us....The blame should be put on one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones.

Buzzmachine via Instapundit.

Sir,

Yesterday you were quoted as saying the following:

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found. The round had been rigged as an IED, which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent. The round was an old binary type requiring the mixing of two chemical components in separate sections of the cell before the deadly agent is produced. The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece. Mixing and dispersal of the agent from such a projectile as an IED is very limited. The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War. Two explosive ordnance team members were minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round."

"The projectile I was talking about was an artillery projectile, what we call a binary chemical projectile, which is a type of projectile where you have two relatively passive chemicals loaded in the same shell; when you fire it through an artillery round, the rotation of the artillery in flight causes the barriers between the two chambers inside the shell to break, causes them to mix; then as a result you have, when it lands and explodes, the release of a nerve agent, in this case sarin."

AND

"No. Completely separate. It would have exploded. It would have exploded -- if it was a normal artillery round being used as an IED, you would have the kind of effect that you would see down near the Green Zone today. But because it was a chemical round, you don't have explosives inside the projectile; you have chemicals.

AND

What makes binary weapons relatively safe for handling on a day- to-day basis is because they're in separate chambers, they can be handled without significant risk towards the persons handling them. That was one of the reasons you went with binary chemicals, because you have two fairly passive chemicals not mixed. But it takes the launching of the artillery round itself before the chambers break, causing them to mix, so that it becomes dangerous on the far end. That doesn't happen when you have an IED. When you have an IED, or you rig it as an IED, it just blows up and you have the chemicals spewing out -- minor amounts going in different directions.

Sir, is this is a binary round that is a "mix-in-air" type as you appear to state that it is?

Sir, are you aware that Iraq never declared this type of shell, and was only thought to have crude mix on the ground type of shells? Could you clarify what you meant by old?

I have followed quite a few refers back to comments on other blogs, along with the comments that are here. And it is apparent that many people don't get it.

The engineering of this device is outside my area of expertise, but the import of the information is not. blaster is the engineer, I am soon to be a lawyer. (Graduate from law school on Saturday the 24th) Thus, I will give a shot at an explanation from an engineering rookie point of view, although I believe that blaster has been absolutely clear.

1) Kimmitt clearly states that this is an air mix weapon. He also stated that it was an old weapon. It is not clear what Kimmitt means by old. The LA Times took Kimmitt's statement to mean pre GW1. However, I think blaster has presented very strong evidence that this cannot be the case. There were no air mix weapons used in the Iran-Iraq war. The technology was considered beyond the capability of the Iraqis. Therefore, I think it is clear that the device cannot both be an air mix weapon, and a Iran-Iraq war shell casing. One possibility apparently excludes the other. Either Kimmitt is wrong about the type of shell (A possibility), or by old he meant prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

2) I find it hard to believe that the Army would just put this out in this fashion. Do they not understand the implications of this shell? This means that in one nice compact package, terrorists have both precursors to make Sarin. That is very concerning. Why would the military broadcast that? One hopes that there are no 155mm howitzers in terrorist hands.

3) If blaster picked it up, and it would require someone with a background to understand the implications at first, then surely others will know as well. Apparently Kay thinks this is no big deal. But has someone asked him about the binary nature of the device? Blix?

This is what is so frustrating about the current media. Here is a story with real questons to ask. But they will not get asked.

This chemical artillery round story is the biggest traffic attractor ever on this blog. A notice from NRO and Instapundit are the biggies, but plenty of other links from all around. Thanks for linking. But anything that gets attention will also attract critics. I would like to address some of the criticism I have seen of my posts below.

First of all, who is this blaster guy, anyway? Just some engineer with a computer writing random crap, right? Sure, that is mostly true. If you aren't a long-time reader, and you haven't bothered reading everything I have posted from day 1, (and, really, you aren't missing that much if you haven't!), you probably aren't aware that I am a former Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer. I still remember one or two things about how ordnance works. And when I first heard the report that the shell contained sarin and that it was a binary round, my ears pricked up. Open sources linked in the posts below confirm what made me suspicious.

Some commenters here and other places note that the LA Times was not "lying" when they wrote that BG Kimmitt "said" that the round appeared to be from the 1980s. When compared with other paraphrases, reporting what he said, the paraphrases reword what he actually said. To say he said that it appeared to be from the 1980's, you have to go through several leaps from things he said at various points in the press conference. However, the truth is, he never provided a date, or a range of dates. His reference to the round being of a type that the Iraqis had declared destroyed prior to 1991 appears to be a dig, as that claim of having destroyed all sarin shells by 1991 is disproven in the UNSCOM report, also linked below.

Now let's talk about binary technology. The Iraqis owned up to binary agents in aerial bombs and missile warheads. The technology UNSCOM reports, and US estimates refer to, is a "fill before firing" - i.e., one component is in the round, a second component added before use of the weapon. An aerial bomb would be veryeasy to do this with - it is basically a big metal tank. A fill plug is easy to include and use. Same with a missile warhead.

An artillery shell is different. It is much more likely to remain closed - thus requiring both components to be sealed in the shell - or have a removable baseplate, and two canisters put in with the components.

There are various declarations one can point to that show sarin in artillery, and binary capability, but you will not find a binary, mix in flight, artillery shell assigned to Iraqi capability.

That's what makes it a big discovery.

Iraq never declared any binary 155mm artillery shells. In fact, they never claimed any filled with sarin at all in the UNSCOM Final report (Find on "Munitions declared by Iraq as remaining"). Not declared as existing at the end of the Gulf War, not having been destroyed in the Gulf War, not having been destroyed unilaterally. The only binary munitions claimed by the Iraqis were aerial bombs and missile warheads. Not in an artillery shell.

According to this UNSCOM factsheet (PDF):

Iraqi CW agents were not comparable in quality to those stored in the arsenals of the USA and the former USSR, however. Impurities meant that the toxic compounds lacked stability and easily decomposed; as a consequence, Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition, whereby the final mixing of the two precursors to the agent was done inside the munition just before delivery. This had a major impact on the logistics of and preparations for chemical warfare, which may partly explain how overwhelming coalition air superiority prevented the use of CW during Operation Desert Storm.

According to this source, Iran did use chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War. However, they are not suspected of production of G-nerve agent (sarin or tabun) until 1993, and not suspected of binary chemical capability until 1995.

So this is definitely not an Iranian dud. It has to be a post Iran-Iraq War, post Desert Storm product.

Through the referrer logs, a link to Sean Hannity's forums. There, someone posts an LA Times article to refute what I have posted here. LA Times requires registration, and here is part of what they quoted from the article:

Kimmitt said the chemical munition appeared to be left over from the 1980s, when Baghdad secretly produced hundreds of tons of poison gas. United Nations records show that the sarin Iraq produced in the mid-1980s degraded quickly, however, and was no longer lethal by the early 1990s.

Note first that they jump from something Kimmitt said to something the UN says that really is not related to what he said. But here is the thing - I cannot find anywhere that Kimmitt said that the munition appeared to be from the 80's in a press conference. What he did say in the press conference:

Mixing and dispersal of the agent from such a projectile as an IED is very limited. The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.

....

It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time, and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED. And basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it.

Nowhere in the press conference does BG Kimmitt date this round to the 80's - "ex-regime time" can be as recent as April of last year. And I know that this is the press conference that the LA Times means, because they also say this:

Kimmitt said two soldiers who transported the material were treated for minor exposure to chemical agents and released. The area "is not a continuing threat" and "needs no special marking off [or] decontamination," he added.

This is BG Kimmitt from the CPA press conference:

Because the binary chemicals were not allowed to mix, there were very, very small traces, and the EOD people that went up showed some minor indications of nerve poisoning. However, it was so minor that the doctors already have these people released. So it is not a continuing threat, and the area needs no special marking-off, nor does it -- nor did it need additional decontamination.

So here is how the press intends to spin this story - they will blatantly lie about it. Nowhere does BG Kimmitt provide a date or estimate for the age of the round. Yet the LA Times writes that he said it was from the 1980s. And they then further reference a report about unitary chemicals that do not apply to binary rounds.

Ombudsman?

The discovery of a chemical round in Iraq is getting some small amount of coverage. It is just a single round. Did we invade Iraq for one artillery shell?

No, of course not. However, this is still a tremendous revelation, because of conclusions not yet drawn from what has been reported. This is what BG Kimmit had to say about the round that was found:

The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found. The round had been rigged as an IED, which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy. A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent. The round was an old binary type requiring the mixing of two chemical components in separate sections of the cell before the deadly agent is produced. The cell is designed to work after being fired from an artillery piece. Mixing and dispersal of the agent from such a projectile as an IED is very limited. The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War. Two explosive ordnance team members were minor exposure to nerve agent as a result of the partial detonation of the round.

What BG Kimmitt is describing is a "mix in flight" binary round. While he says that the Iraqs had declared all such rounds destroyed prior to the 1991 Gulf War, that isn't entirely true. The truth is the Iraqis said they never had such rounds. The Iraqis never claimed to have them. The United States never thought they had the capability:

The U.S. Defense Department’s “Militarily Critical Technologies List” (MCTL) is “a detailed compendium of technologies" that the department advocates as “critical to maintaining superior US military
capabilities. It applies to all mission areas, especially counter-proliferation.” Written in 1998, it was recently re-published with updates for 2002.

....

There was some talk shortly before the first Gulf War that the Iraqis had been creating binary chemical weapons, in which the relatively non-toxic ingredients of the agent remain unmixed until just before the weapon is used; this allows the user to bypass any worry about shelf life or toxicity. But according to the MCTL , “The Iraqis had a small number of bastardized binary munitions in which some unfortunate individual was to pour one ingredient into the other from a Jerry can prior to use” – an action few soldiers were willing to perform.

Note that the referenced article is from Alternet, and it is saying that the US, Ritter, and the UN "knew" that there was no binary weapons capability in Iraq. We know that they didn't have these prior to the Gulf War, and the UN says that they never developed or weaponized any WMD after the Gulf War, under the inspection regime.

So where did this round come from? If it is Iraqi, it is certainly a new development - right under the noses of the UN inspectors (potential NY Post headline: "Blix Shits Brix"). It is not an old round from the Iran-Iraq war, or from shelling of Kurds or Shi'ites after the Gulf War. And this is not the sort of thing that someone put a single one together in the lab - it came off of a production line somewhere.

Even more troubling, if it isn't Iraqi, where did it come from? If it came from another country, then certainly the people who planted the IED knew what was in it.

This is huge, HUGE news.

UPDATE: I see that Jonah has picked up on this item, and there is already a response from another reader. In response to the response, that the shell was unmarked is not news at all. This was noted in the first Kay report:

Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons. For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

Note to the CIA, and to Joe - ordnance - no "i." A pet peeve. But I digress.

In short, the fact that this round was not marked chemical is something that we already knew - it is old news. What is "new," here, and thus news, is the existence of a round in Iraq using a technology that noone to this date had proven the Iraqis to have - a technology suspected but not proven by the US, and denied by the Iraqis and UN.

A scathing critique of the American Political Elite

Not sure I wholly agree, but he has a point. Lots of points.

Belmontclub also has something that is interesting to contrast against Helprin's viewpoint.

Is it the perception, or is it the reality?

After all, today we lost the rotating leader of the IGC just outside the green zone, and found a Sarin shell being used as an IED

Meanwhile the media continues its quest to destroy an Administration at a moment of crises.

I feel like I am in Wonderland.

Sweet. I've been pushing for this move for a while.

I just watched a segment of Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Specifically the segment with Cece Connolly, Juan Williams, Brit Hume and Bill Kristol.

No transcript as of yet, but I was taken aback by the tenor of the discussion. Especially between Juan Williams and Brit Hume. Juan Williams can be a pain, but I have never heard him straw man arguments like he was in this segment.

The basic gist of the argument was originally advanced by Bill Kristol. That being that the overarching importance of the War and its objectives are being critically undermined by the focus on the abuse scandals. Juan took that to mean that we are all okay with torture. After a back and forth, Brit stepped in.

In the middle of his sentence, Juan interrupted Brit, and badly distorted the point that Brit was not through making. Brit was visibly irritated, something I have never seen before. And then went on to make his point in a manner that made clear his irritation at Juan, and made his point crystal clear.

Wallace then jumped in and ended the segment, but you could see the two men glaring at each other. Something I have never seen.

I think, once again, that we are at another point at which the two major outlooks in the United States cannot seem to communicate. These have occurred during the Iran-Contra affair, the Clarence Thomas Hearing, Monica Lewinsky, the 2000 Presidential election, Iraq and now this.

Now I don't know if the situation has always been like this, but in my experience of being acutely aware in politics, which I can date to 1986, the animosity and bitterness between the two viewpoints seems to be getting much worse with time.

Now, I can imagine that there have been times of similar animosity. The American Civil War is an example of a major diversion in ideology that could not be reconciled. While I am not trying to say that this is analagous, I am going to say that no matter what happens in November with the Presidential election, there is a significant portion (30%) who is going to find the result very hard to take. And heaven help us if it is like 2000, with a heavily disputed result.

When 2000 happened, I was in South Africa, and I pointed out to my relatives who were giving me a hard time about the event that only one brick had been thrown through one window. If this happens again, I don't know if I will be able to say that.

Everyone sort of needs to take a breath and stand back. I go on the BBS's and the arguments are heated. At school, people don't even debate because of the level of animosity between differing opinions. This is not healthy.