Looks like I'm going to have to give you another lesson in how to read things carefully and deliberately, without a bias. Perhaps your lack of care in reading is simply some sort of disability. Might be dollars in such a thing.
You say: "The key element in the story is "tagged." It wasn't hidden stuff that was smuggled out, it was stuff UNMOVIC had tagged, that was looted."
Well, yes, it does say that, but that is not all it says. You can find this in the NYT article, too: "..many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect "dual use" ones having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons."
You see the "many" in there? Didn't that ring a bell? No? Too bad.
What you say is clearly not the full story, obviously, because the article also quotes Perrico's assistant, Ewen Buchanan, as saying that what has been found was "...only a snapshot."
Think about that phrase. Think hard. It means that only a very brief part of the reality has been captured, i.e., that there is potentially a lot of the stuff that has not yet been found. That didn't make it to the "snapshot." Thus, whether it was tagged cannot be proven. Savvy?
Also think hard, and objectively, if you are capable of doing so, about this phrase in the article:
"We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."
Does that change your mind? Inject a little uncertainty into your simplistic "it's all been tagged before" line? No? Too bad.
And what do you make of the fact that Al Baradei, of the IAEA, is quoted by the NYT article I linked as believing that contaminated material--radioactively contaminated since that is his field--was being smuggled out of Iraq.
You think the contaminated material was tagged?
You think Saddam was supposed to have radioactive material?
Tagged or otherwise?
Put all this together and the "it was all tagged" line seems gossamer thin.
Seems to me that you're mostly interested in defending an opinion regardless of how well grounded it might be.
This may help:
how-to-study.com
And you still haven't responded to the argument that Saddam had the capacity to buy WMD in the black market. An argument that I call the elephant in the bedroom argument. Ignore it as much as you want, it isn't going away. |
