Friday 25 April 2003

Liberate This!

“25,000 litres of anthrax. 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin. 500 tons of sarin, mustard [gas] and VX nerve agent. Several mobile biological weapons labs. An advanced nuclear weapons development program.” - what George W. Bush reckoned Saddam was hiding under his moustache.

Remember why the US/UK went to war? Supposedly Iraq had a massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and was therefore a threat to world peace. Hans Blix and his team of UN weapons inspectors went looking for them, Saddam Hussein grudgingly cooperated, and the inspectors found… er, not a lot.

But despite the blatant lack of justification, Emperor Bush invaded Iraq anyway (he’d been told to by his dad’s mates) and Iraq used its weapons to defend itself – not mustard gas or intercontinental ballistic missiles after all, but rifles and crappy old tanks against the world’s foremost military superpower. Someone should have listened to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter who described the Iraqi army as being “in total disarray, capable of little more than manning security pickets along the Iran-Iraq border… I have visited numerous Iraqi military barracks and have seen soldiers in tattered uniforms and bare feet.”

So, where DID all those supposed evil weapons of mass destruction get to? Well, your on the ball SchNEWS has managed to track down some of them at Britain’s own Faslane naval base in Scotland. 166 people were nicked at the base on Tuesday when hundreds of protestors blocked the gates for hours while others jumped the fences, sparking a security alert and waving banners that read “Here Blix, we’ve found them.”

Faslane is home to three of Britain’s four Trident submarines. Each submarine carries 48 nuclear warheads, each one 8 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima which destroyed the city and killed 140,000 people. British Minister of War Geoff Hoon was keen to use them, threatening Iraq that if they unleased THEIR weapons of mass destruction, his country would do the same. But Saddam never did unleash anything, which is a bit strange since he never seemed one for restraint.

And now, if Bush doesn’t turn up some weapons of mass destruction soon, he will be exposed as the bullying liar he truly is. Tony Blair is worried too - worried that no big bad weapons will be found, or that if they are, the Americans will be accused of planting them (surely not!). Last week, Blair said that “some sort of objective verification” of any weapons found might be a “good idea.” Smart boy, Tony.

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