On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Monday, April 07, 2003
[pun only semi-intentional]
Another so-called “smoking gun” about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has turned out to be less-than smoking. Yesterday, a Knight-Ridder wire story claimed that U.S. forces found evidence of sarin [or possibly another G-class nerve agent such as Tabun or cyclohexylsarin] at a facility near Baghdad. The report quoted a Sgt. Todd Ruggles claiming “I was right” about the presence of chemical weapons in Iraq.
Not so fast, Sergeant. AFP reports that further tests have shown the compounds to be organophosphate pesticides, which, although chemically related to common nerve agents, are not terribly effective at killing people; they're much better at taking out arthropods.
A military intelligence officer for the US 101st Airborne Division's aviation brigade, Captain Adam Mastrianni, told AFP that comprehensive tests determined the presence of the pesticide compounds...That helps to explain why the soldiers showed symptoms of pesticide exposure, I suppose...
Mastrianni said: “They thought it was a nerve agent. That's what it tested. But it is pesticide.”
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