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.When George Bush made his declaration of victory aboard the USSAbraham Lincoln on 1 May, he said:We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biologicalweapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will beinvestigated.Dr.John Coleman72Some progress has been made.It was reported that a team of expertssearching for WMD had concluded that a trailer found near the city ofMosul in northern Iraq was a mobile biological weapons laboratory.The team agreed, however other experts did not share their views.Some officials claim, that up to three such laboratories have beendiscovered although no biological or chemical agents have been foundat any of them.(It turned out that the "mobile labs" were vehiclesequipped to fill artillery spotter balloons with hydrogen gas, althoughthis information was buried in the back pages of British and Americannewspapers.)On May 11th General Richard Myers, the chairman of the U.S.JointChiefs of Staff, said WMD might still be in the hands of Iraqi specialunits.Were they fully deployed and could they have been brought tobear on us, or are they still perhaps out there somewhere in some sortof bunker and could have been used? he said at the U.S.regionalheadquarters in Qatar: We are trying to run that one to the ground.Butthose on the ground were more skeptical.U.S.central commandstarted the war with a list of 19 priority suspected weapons sites.Allbut two were searched without uncovering any evidence.A further 69were identified as sites that might offer clues to the whereabouts ofWMD.Of these, 45 were searched without success.Some experts believed that one of the problems was that WMD searchteams were held back for too long, allowing Iraqi forces to dismantleor destroy equipment.Others believe that the assessment that suchweapons existed was wrong.One Defense Intelligence Agencyofficial said: "We came to bear country and we came loaded for bearand we found that the bear was not there.The question was 'where areSaddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons?' What is thequestion now? That is what we are trying to sort out."In 2008 it is clear that the whole concoction of Hussein's possession ofWMD's was nothing, but a disgusting lie of immense proportions andthis has been borne out by the Senate Committee Report, led by Sen.Jay Rockefeller.He denounced both Bush and Cheney by name andaccused them of deliberately going to the American people andCongress.The search for WMD continued under the auspices of theIraq Survey Group, which also hunted for information about PresidentWe Fight For Oil73Hussein's government.The White House claimed this was a biggerunit than the task force.But officials admitted that the number of staffhunting for weapons was scaled back.For weeks, we heard breathlessmedia reports of possible discoveries of chemical and biologicalweapons by U.S.and British troops in Iraq.Within hours or days, ifone scours the back pages of the newspaper, one finds that it wasmerely another false alarm.But what was never mentioned was thatthese weapons, even if they ever existed, were made five, ten orfifteen years ago, and would almost certainly have been unusable,having long since passed their stable shelf-life, according to theDepartment of Defense's own documents based on a decade ofinternational inspections, electronic surveillance and informationsupplied by "spies and defectors."There was never any question Iraq had once possessed weapons ofmass destruction programs, but no actual weapons, nor was the worldnaive enough to trust Saddam Hussein not to try and hide suchweapons from UN inspectors.The rationale for the U.S.invasion, however, was that after a decadeof sanctions, war, U.S.bombing runs, and UN inspections, Iraq stillposed as a viable nuclear, chemical and biological threat.The Bushadministration said they could be deployed beyond Iraq's borders orcould be supplied to terrorist groups.Unfortunately for Bush, there is absolutely no basis for this argument,so forcefully made by then Secretary of State Colin Powell at theUnited Nations, when he claimed to possess clear evidence that hugestocks of everything from Sarin gas, also known by its NATOdesignation GB, to anthrax, to sanction-violating missiles, were storedin Iraq, ready for use.Never mind that the same Iraqi defector who told Powell about thestores of chemical and bio weapons also said they had beencompletely destroyed, which Powell neglected to tell the UnitedNations and the world.It didn't matter, even if true -- which it was not because those stores would almost certainly have become uselessand perished after all those years on the shelf.Dr.John Coleman74Strangely, the U.S.media have, with almost no exceptions, failed tomention that most bio/chemical agents have a rather limited shelf life
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