he spent three nights on Mount Washington in New Hampshire with a sprained ankle. He survived the ordeal using his scouting skills.

Obviously what ever scouting skills the pratt with the ankle had weren't learnt from reading Baden Powell's "Scouting for Boys". Had he learnt anything from that book's title at least he might have found better luck in San Francisco or Old Compton Street here in London's Soho than ever he would half way up a dreary mountain in a Hampshire new or otherwise.

Can you please stop nicking our names for places and find your own if you don't mind?

Poor jlnum03 is determined to prove that George Bush was right to invade Iraq and that only “loonies” deny the proof before their very eyes. This sensitive soul writes: “When I stated that Saddam had tons of yellow cake uranium, in addition to other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), I was cursed and mocked by the left-wing America haters in here. They said yellow cake was proof of WMD, and that Bush would be proven correct. But, the haters said, there was no yellow cake uranium. I was, and still am, stunned by such blind ignorance. Even the U.N. stated that Saddam had it. Since 1991! The left wing main media refused to admit it.” Of course, this “blind ignorance” demonstrates that “The left-wing believes in what they are ordered to believe. They were told that there was no yellow cake. And, like the true believers in Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Soviet Union...they believed it.”

Avoiding the “left-wing loonie blog[s]” jlnum03 abhors, it is possible to use only the sources cited by this purveyor of the truth to come to a somewhat different conclusion. First, the introductory segment of the Iraqwatch website jlnum03 finds so persuasive begins with an interesting overview:

"U.S. pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s weapons that has been made public, or leaked, since the war reveals that Saddam Hussein was not actively working on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. For instance, suspicion about the existence of mobile biological weapons labs was a primary source of evidence offered by President Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq. . . In addition, a secret DIA-dispatched fact-finding mission in May 2003 concluded that the two trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had nothing to do with biological weapons and were not biological weapon laboratories. Yet, only days later, President Bush made a public announcement that these trailers were the long-sought biological weapon laboratories

Further, it has been revealed that the CIA received information from Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein’s last foreign minister who was paid by French intelligence to provide information about Iraq’s weapon programs. Sabri indicated that Hussein had nuclear ambitions but no active nuclear program. Sabri also reported that Hussein had a biological weapons research program, and some stocks of chemical weapons not under military control.

According to a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment from 2002, the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was “unlikely.” This assessment was made nearly a year before President Bush stated in his 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Since it is reasonable to assume that the president was privy to this information, perhaps George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq based on lies and that he and his administration continued to lie to the American people when the erstwhile weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize.

Continuing on to the chemical weapons portion of jlnum03's posts, a further reading of the sources cited by this reader offers another perspective on her/his main argument: First, there was no evidence cited in this report that Sadaam Hussein possessed an active chemical weapons program: “After UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, U.S.-led forces bombed many sites believed to be chemical weapon plants. After the bombing, reports emerged that Iraq had rebuilt many of those sites, and that the sites appeared to be operating. It was inferred that Iraq had resumed its production of chemical weapons, and was adding new elements to the portion of its previous stockpile that had never been accounted for. No evidence confirming these inferences has emerged to date.”

http://www.iraqwatch.org/profiles/chemical.html

As for the 2004 chemical attack, the article in the Washington Post contains some interesting information jlnum03 neglected to share: “The discovery of the nerve agent, reported yesterday by a team that has been searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since shortly after last year's U.S.-led invasion, marked the first time the team has found one of the types of weapons that the Bush administration cited as initial justification for toppling the government of Saddam Hussein . . . The experts, including David Kay, the Pentagon's former top weapons hunter in Iraq, said the discovery did not conclusively prove the existence of stockpiles of concealed chemical and biological weapons. Kay . . . said the shell was likely one of thousands produced for the Iran-Iraq war.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33082-2004May17.html

The CNN report about the same incident indicates that there were two chemical weapons used but that one was so old that it was no longer an active weapon: “Laboratory tests of an artillery shell used in a May roadside bomb in the Baghdad area confirmed the presence of the nerve agent sarin, and a shell found two weeks before then contained the decayed residue of mustard gas. . . The sarin shell was designed to mix two precursor chemicals after being fired from a cannon, and it was ineffective as a roadside bomb. The mustard gas shell was "less troublesome" because the contents had deteriorated to the point that it was no longer an active chemical weapon.”

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/26/iraq.duelfer/index.html

I would encourage any readers interested in avoiding jlnow3's sophistry to look at the articles and judge for themselves what conclusions are warranted. In particular, the Fox article cited by jlnow3 offers a different perspective, no doubt informed by their constant cheerleading for the Iraq war.