'Unaccounted for' Iraqi weapons may be bookkeeping glitches

http://globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030906.wweap0906/BNStory/International/

Associated Press

New York — No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or London.

But what about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping — the gaps that led United Nations inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for?

Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the notorious "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s.

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On edit, something verrrry interesting: I couldn't find this story on our AP wire here at work. So instead I went to the members-only AP website, where a search found the story -- but coded in such a way that most U.S. newspapers will not get this story unless they specifically search for it. The details are far too geeky to get into, but that explains why I first found this story on a Canadian website, and why a quick search of Google News just now didn't find any matches on it.

Maybe Bush shoul mention that in his speech tomorrow (tonight for East Coasters).

from the Iraqis in the months leading up to the invasion: They just didn't keep good records when they were destroying proscribed weapons.

bad bookkeeping? Makes you wanna go :wtf:

...remember that line? I guess it isn't. Tyrants and frauds often fall victim to the foibles of 'fuzzy math'....

He lives by it. It is what he learned in his MBA classes... or should had.

This has been a murderous twelve years, and a murderous year. As much as I'm happy to see Saddam Hussein out of power, history will write with irony that he was being truthful, while the so-called President of the United States was lying his ass off. And, of course, our perceptions here are much different from that in the Arab world, where these revelations may very well be viewed as both vindication and evidence of the outrageous crime that this invasion and occupation represents. Thousands and thousands of people are dead.

Could Hans Blix and crew have come to these same conclusions had they been given another six months (or even six weeks) to complete this task?

And if they had, would all those dead people be alive and well? Would the nation be on the brink of fiscal catastrophe with no end or remedy in sight? Would our former closest allies view us as patient and committed to human rights, or as blustering war mongering imbeciles?

No reasonable and ethical person can stomach the actions of the US/UK colonizing forces. It is a monumental and historic crime.

thousands of innocents over clerical errors? This is too much to take in at one time.

That, in the most modern, up-to-date country in the world, with computerized tracking and relatively little corruption? In a society like Iraq's, where there was lots of corruption, it would be much more difficult to keep accurate books. Hussein might order things to be made, and people would say they werre, but pocket some of the money instead, while reporting otherwise. This is one of the many reasons 'preventive wars' suck.

I hadn't drawn that parallel before.

The Pentagon "loses" a trillion dollars, and yet it scoffed at Iraq's claim of poor record keeping in accounting for the destruction of weapons. Weapons which would have been rendered inert anyway by now even if they hadn't been destroyed.

And say the cabal were possibly aware of the bad bookkeeping and exploited it to their advantage. Not everyone in the Security Council got the full CD’s that Iraq submitted. Everyone saw discrepancies, but only a few knew why. Call them what you may and deservedly, but they aren’t stupid.

:shrug:

damn that fuzzy math....damn those evil doer bookkeepers...always making other people look bad...

I am sticking to the Romulan cloaking device.
or the same shielding technology Wonder Woman used to hide her plane in the TV show...
There are WMDs in Iraq

This is too reasonable and the drones, like the one I argued with a few nights ago, will still go on and on and on...about the gazillion liters of anthrax/VX/fill in the blank that is clearly stated in the UN inspectors reports!!!



The North Koreans have millions of these things trained to attack our Freedoms for God Sakes!!!

at the time that there were no WMD. There was NEVER a case made prior to the invasion/genocide that lasted for more that a few seconds. They knew it, the Congress knew it & so did everybody who backed it. Otherwise, the UN would have been allowed to complete their work.

...J. Clifford Baxter's every day.

Who would have guessed, huh?

Now if the administration can figure out what happened to those 3 million jobs...

and those tens of thousands of Iraqis who were recently alive...

and a few odd trillions of dollars...

Think about it- our government is saying the situation in Iraq is going better than it is.

They're saying the economy is going better than it is.

If the people who run our government are going to lie in a situation like that, what happens when the stakes for telling the truth are much bigger?

And wanna know what?


The people in the gov't- KNEW these were lies and exaggerations...

'Oh Well, it was just a little mistake.

......but we know what's Iran is doing and we have to disarm 'em, cuz they'll be over here before long, cuz they don't like our freedom and
are jealous of us cool cats.

Colin Powell will be showing us satellite photos of what Iran is up too.

EOM!!

Gee, what are the odds that the person who would know the most about this issue was actually RIGHT?

there was nothing that was going to keep them out of iraq.
i'm not sure that even without 9-11 we wouldn't have invaded iraq.
this is what they wanted come hell or innocent lives.

...into Google and the story comes up. Not this one for some reason. What does that say about Google?

Don

quite a while ago....

<snip>It was always a "fragile assumption" to expect Iraq to provide a highly detailed, fully consistent and well documented account of all its weapons work, said U.S. defence analyst Carl Conetta.

No military can do that, he wrote in a report recapping the Iraq inspections.

A U.S. audit last year, for example, found the Pentagon had lost track of more than one million chemical-biological protective suits, said Mr. Conetta, of the Project on Defense Alternatives, a private think-tank.

In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in 1994 that almost 2.7 tonnes of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs, had "vanished" from U.S. stocks, because of discrepancies between "book inventory" and "physical inventory."

:eyes:

Apparently it can travel into the future and screw up accounting as well as travel back in the past and make people forget to file SEC paperwork on their insider trading.

That is some penis that Clinton's penis.

So the unquestioned numbers that were provided by the horrible Saddam that were used to justify the "policy of subtraction" were wrong?

You said you had 100 units (the hawks accepted this without question)
We know we destroyed 80 units (though there was no inventory done before the huge ammo dump was blown up in Gulf1 which of course caused Gulf War syndrome that really doesn't exist)

So therefore you must have 20 units left. WHERE ARE THEY?!?!?!

Gee turns out that those original numbers provided by a madman might not have been right and of course they didn't use what they didn't have to embarass us and of course we might have been lied to by Iraqi double agents who mislead us but of course not our guy Chalabi who knows everything there is to know about a country he hasn't been in in 20 years.


Yeah something like that.

I only hope they will remember the death penalty for bad records when Kenny Lay's head is on the block...or the DOD and it's "loss" of trillions