Like I've already said, more about Scottie McClellan later on. But first, a tiny little nugget on the whole subject of how the so-called-liberal-media was just doing their job. Like when they swallowed this whopper from Colin Powell, the UN speech that BushCo taking points compared to Adlai Stevenson's speech during the Cuban Missle Crisis, when we had actual photos of actual Soviet missiles.
Folks who knew about the intertubes at the time had ready access to a devastating evisceration of Powell's presentation within less than 24 hours from British researcher Dr Glen Rangwala.
But, really, as marvelous as Rangwala's research doubtlessly was, all you really needed to see through Colin Powell was a pair of eyeballs. Of course, it didn't hurt if you'd seen some classic episodes of Saturday Night Live, since it seemed like Powell had just stepped out of one of their absurdist scripts, particularly when he tried--with a straight face--to push the argument that a satellite photo of a truck proved the existence of chemical weapons inside the building where the truck was parked.
What? Think I'm exaggerating? Think I'm pulling your leg? Well, here's the link to his speech again, and just over the jump is the exact passage of the speech, complete with the slides he used.
Let me say a word about satellite images before I show a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate, to our imagery specialists.
Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji. This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapons shells.
Here you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.
How do I know that? How can I say that? Let me give you a closer look. Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers.
The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions. The arrow at the top that says "security" points to a facility that is a signature item for this kind of bunker. Inside that facility are special guards and special equipment to monitor any leakage that might come out of the bunker. The truck you also see is a signature item. It's a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong. This is characteristic of those four bunkers. The special security facility and the decontamination vehicle will be in the area, if not at any one of them or one of the other, it is moving around those four and it moves as needed to move as people are working in the different bunkers.
Now look at the picture on the right. You are now looking at two of those sanitized bunkers. The signature vehicles are gone, the tents are gone. It's been cleaned up. And it was done on the 22nd of December as the UN inspection team is arriving, and you can see the inspection vehicles arriving in the lower portion of the picture on the right.
The bunkers are clean when the inspectors get there. They found nothing.
This sequence of events raises the worrisome suspicion that Iraq had been tipped off to the forthcoming inspections at Taji.
In his paper, Rangwala made mention of this in his introductory remarks, before going into detail. He wrote:
Below, the 44 distinct claims in Secretary Powell's speech of 5 February 2003 are reviewed. The main features of the Powell presentation are as follows:
(a) Secretary Powell makes strong claims about Iraq's retention and development of non-conventional weapons, but the claims that he provides substantive evidence for are either tangential or the evidence is ambiguous.
An example would be how Powell claimed: "We know that Saddam's son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes ... We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities." If Powell had been able to show any evidence for either of these claims, that would have constituted much more plausible proof of the US claims.
However, instead of providing proof of any of those claims, Powell instead produced photos of al-Taji ammunition storage facility that shows a small shed and a truck adjacent to the bunker. Powell claimed that these are "a signature item" for chemical bunkers. This seems on the face of it to be a wholly implausible claim: a picture of a truck and a shed by themselves reveal nothing about the contents of the adjacent bunker.
In summary, Powell didn't provide evidence for the stronger claims that he made, instead displaying a satellite photo that reveals very little. This would indicate that the evidence for the stronger claims is either non-existent or contentious.
But I'll just put it much more simply. You see, I have my own alternative satellite interpretations to show you. My experts tell me that the position of the truck is a dead giveaway to what sort of recreatioal activities the drivers are engaged in. Their data is so accurate that one can tell precisely what's going on inside of the bunker with 99% accuracy given the angle at which the truck is parked (+/- 1.5 degrees) and the distance it is from the building in question.
Allow me to illustrate with a detailed analysis of the signature vehicles and what their positions really have to tell us.
First, there's this:
And this:
Then there's this:
And, finally, this:
Now, where's my Nobel Peace Prize?
And where's my damn Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!???
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