Slashdot Mirror
Chemical Experts Begin Destroying Syria's Chemical Arsenal
An anonymous reader writes "The joint team of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN said here that the process of destroying Syria's chemical weapons programme began on Sunday." Of note, this linked article on how to destroy the chemical agents safely.
4. ??
4. Get campaign contributions from stakeholders of large defense contractors in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts for weapons we don't need.
4a. Blow shit up using weapons we paid way too much for.
4b. Get campaign contributions from stakeholder of large contracting companies in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts to rebuild the country that we blew up.
5. Profit!
Sadly there will always be some doubt that there's still a hidden cache of it somewhere, just waiting for the day.
I'm sure that there are clever mechanisms for extending the shelf life (probably purchased from Hostess Snack Cakes' military contracting arm); but chemical weapons don't always store well. Shit-grade Sarin can be good for as little as a couple of weeks on the shelf. Hiqh quality binary munitions might actually be worth burying for future use.
Some of the more retro agents keep better (some of the WWII-and-before sulfur mustards we dumped into the ocean as our foolproof disposal plan formed these neat clumps that are inert on the outside but still have a delicious toxiny filling...), and I certainly wouldn't volunteer to be the lucky guy who gets to scrub out even 'degraded' sarin; but it's not nearly as easy as just putting the stuff on the shelf and expecting it work a decade from now (the storage vices of any delivery components, rocket motors, guidance systems with oddball proprietary batteries, artillery shells with corrosive propellants, whatever, are an additional nuisance, if a much better understood one).
Dude, getting sent to the Hague is for losers. As best I can tell, Mr. Assad is still in the 'doing a pretty good job hanging on to his office, thanks' camp, which enjoys near-impunity by virtue of an international consensus of, um, all the people who are doing a pretty good job hanging on to their offices, thanks...
Look I'm all for the solution we've now reached but the evidence was pretty solid that the Syrian government committed the atrocity.
As for "Russia presented its evidence to the UN.", no it really didn't. It said it was going to present it's evidence to the UN which turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of opinions. Compare and contrast that to evidence from western nations and independent researchers alike who have released information openly and it's pretty damning.
I don't know how one can really side with Russia's closed accusations, the demonstrably doctored videos and so forth that supposedly showed the launch, the delay in letting the inspectors out there and so forth. It's pathetic. Russia could tell you anything and you'd believe it.
Not striking seems to be a reasonable option, but if your reasons for supporting it are "Russia said!" and "But America has used them in the past too!" then you're supporting it for the wrong reasons.
You may want to read the very article you linked all over again, because you seem to have pulled out a very small section of it and come to a conclusion based on that without reading the entire article and accompanying links.
You talk about publicly auditable and then you ignore the plethora of evidence from a variety of sources including from even extremely objective nations on the issue like some of those in South America and India that explains exactly why it's almost certain Assad was responsible and then you take the closed evidence from Russia which no one's sure even exists because we've never actually seen it and only heard them talk about it. We've just seen bullshit statements like in this news article which no evidence actually seemed to surface from:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/russia-syrian-rebels-chemical-weapons
Don't pretend you like to base your understanding on facts and evidence when you're ignoring the facts and evidence and feeding straight into bullshit with no evidence to back it up.