Sunday, February 09, 2003

One quick thought

Here’s a small portion of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN last Wednesday, in which he makes reference to what he says is "a small part of a chemical complex called ‘Al Musayyib’".  According to the Secretary, it’s a way-station between chemical weapons factories and field sites. 

This photograph of the site taken two months later, in July, shows not only the previous site which is the figure in the middle at the top with the bulldozer sign near it, it shows that this previous site, as well as all of the other sites around the site have been fully bulldozed and graded.  The topsoil has been removed.  The Iraqis literally removed the crust of the earth from large portions of this site in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence that would be there from years of chemical weapons activity.

Powell implies, or perhaps I merely infer, that inspectors went to that site and obtained samples that did not contain even a trace of the offending chemicals or their byproducts. 

If it’s that easy to remove chemical contamination from a site, then why has the United States spent billions and billions of dollars and a couple of decades on trying to clean up and recover Superfund sites?