And don’t forget they were supposed to have declared all their weapons — but binary artillery shells were never declared.

John: I don’t think we’re disagreeing on anything substantive; I’m just saying I think the lack of markings indicates they were used by SOP, not some special unusual thing.

I believe that only the ‘unitary’? type shells had filler holes. Binary type shells accept the two components in the form of a tube with the to elements divided by a membrane that ruptures upon firing. The chemical mix for the unitary type shells was so corrosive that the shells had to be filled at a time relatively close to use. I don’t have a clue as to exterior appearance of binary shells and I don’t think I’d mention it if I did.

I’m certainly no expert. I was Naval Air, so I’ve never played with artillery (as opposed to, say, Zuni rockets or torpedoes). So my guess on the ability to drill the shells is just based on common sense, not any knowledge. I would guess that one would want to know how to do so without setting off the dispersal charge, but hey, give a drill to a young jihadi and if he finds the charge by mistake, use another jihadi for the next one. I do agree that the IED Sarin Shell was used by someone who didn’t know what he had.usr

If you need a laugh – visit

jibjab.com and look for This Land

We in the blogosphere are really becoming a jack-of-all-trades.

—

Good job, Kevin, you’re bringing a smile to my face.

As far as your other points, well, I’m a back-office intel guy; I never passed the physical to be a front line grunt. My opinion on front-line details should be taken with a little salt. However, as I learned it, we keep all our shells carefully marked. Even so, fairly often someone has a bad day because they called in smoke and got AP.

(As I’m sure you know, but many don’t, there are many kinds of artillery shells, from hit things and make loud noises, to antipersonnel fragmentation, to weird things that plant land mines or throw smoke, or burning white phosphorus, or some electronic packages that we wildly hope are still classified.)

But CW, in Iraqi SOP (and US, when we still used them) are used with HE and antipersonnel, because that forces you to keep your head down and makes it hard to use countermeasures like CBW suits. So it still seems to me the best explanation that they weren’t marked because SOP didn’t require markings.

Of course, I may be making the mistake of assuming that Saddam wasn’t a moron, too.

Your point about how a terrorist could use a binary shell is more or less exactly why I suspect the perpetrators of the IED didn’t know what they had, or weren’t sophisticated about their use.

I think both you and Powerline owe the Wilson/Plames an apology for calling Wilson a liar.You are missing the key sentence in his statement. Refering to the famous “16 words” Wilson said “…then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I UNDERSTOOD them”,caps mine,.Just because Wilson is an idiot and couldn’t figure the facts out does not prove that he was lying, just that he is a moron.And when Valerie came home one night and said that she had recommended Wilson for a special assignment he didn’t understand that it was the trip to Niger, he thought it was a bike messenger job.So once again he proves that when he claimed in his TV interviews that his wife had nothing to do with him going to Africa as far as he understood he was telling the truth.You can’t accuse a man of being a liar when he doesn’t have the smarts to understand the concept.Shame on you Roger!

Sudan orders WMD’s out

I’ll try to find the details on sarin and, if I recall, VX…