Reply from my repuke Congresswoman on WMD - LOL

[osaMABUSh]

My Congresswoman from a repuke suburb of Pittsburgh responded to my email to her calling for her to support a congressional investigation into the misleading or mishandling of intelligence which lead to the "Iraqi War". He response is ludicrous and laughable. But her misinformation is disturbing to me as she is my Rep. in Congress. I would like to respond to it seriousily so I am not blown off as some "liberal" constituent in her sea of conservatives. If you have an opinion about any of her points please post it. I would like to tear apart each of her paragraphs with convincing rebuttals in an email reply.

Here's the text:

"Thank you for contacting me regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is a critical issue, and I appreciate you sharing your concerns with me.

In November 2002, the United Nations (UN) Security Council demanded that the Iraqi government provide a full account of some 1.5 tons of VX-nerve gas, 1,000 tons of mustard gas, and 550 munitions containing mustard gas, which it possessed. Before that report, an independent estimate by the International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded that "Iraq probably has retained substantial growth media and biological weapons agent - (perhaps thousands of liters of anthrax), from pre-1991 stocks. The regime is capable of resuming Biological Weapons Agent production on short notice (in weeks) from existing civilian facilities. It could have produced thousands of liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin and other agents since 1998. Actual stocks cannot be known." Similar independent assessments indicated that the Iraqi regime maintained the ability to develop nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, US intelligence and Iraq's own admission raise concerns that significant amounts of chemical weapons and components to Iraq's nuclear weapons program remain unaccounted for and missing since the early 1990s. As Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld said at a July 24 news briefing, "Before the war, there was no debate about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programs. Virtually everyone agreed they did: in Congress, in successive Democratic and republican administrations, in the intelligence communities here in the United States, and also in foreign countries and at the UN, even among those countries that did not have military action in Iraq."

Evidence continues to surface to support this claim; the discovery of mass grave sites, 11 mobile laboratories buried in the sand, another mobile lab that had been scrubbed clean and also the discovery of nuclear components buried in the backyard of an Iraqi scientist. These are not devices or items that are easy to conceal - a 6 X 10 foot trailer could hold the 8,500 liters of anthrax that the UN believes Iraq possesses - and clearly efforts were made to conceal this evidence.

According to the media and unclassified reports, few significant discoveries of WMD stocks have been made since the end of major military action in Iraq. As a result, numerous critics of the war in Iraq have criticized the US government for possibly manipulating pre-war intelligence to fit political objectives. Critics have leveled similar charges at the British government, which supported US intervention in Iraq. Both governments have defended their respective pre-war analyses of the Iraq threat, and expect that additional evidence of the Iraq WMD threat will be found.

The US House and Senate Intelligence Committees have begun to investigate the discovery of likely mobile bio-weapons labs, Iraqi stockpiles of sarin gas antidote and gas masks, potential evidence of nuclear programs and the possible transportation of WMD out of Iraq. Please be assured that I will monitor these investigations closely.

Again, thank you for sharing your views with me. Please do not hesitate to contact my office if I can be of further assistance to you on this or any other federal matter."