Hi BeardedBruce.

I did not accept as gospel what the military said about chemical weapons in Israel. There has, in fact, been no evidence at all of this except for your testimony that you've heard it from people who were in Israel. Your friends' evidence was not, by the way, "firsthand" in the traditional sense; the only way to know firsthand if there were chemical weapons would be to see people die before your eyes, and I seriously doubt if your friends did. They heard it on the news or what-have-you, just like we did, and as people have pointed out above, those early reports were soon shown to be mistaken. In the Television Age, their knowledge is no more privileged than anyone else's, unless they literally witnessed death by sarin.

I also did not discount the statements of the military as to what they found. I have conceded that prohibited items were found. I do not think they constitute WMD.

It's the mass destruction that matters to me. For me, therefore, WMD is simply this:

enough of a chemical toxin to kill thousands of people alongside a weapon that was designed or adapted to deliver it

enough of a biological agent to kill thousands of people alongside a weapon that was designed or adapted to deliver it

An atomic or nuclear bomb sufficient to kill thousands of people alongside a weapon that was designed or adapted to deliver it.

I have actually never endorsed or used the term WMD myself, because so many people take it to mean chlorine bleach and ammonia, or mustard gas, or any number of primitive chemical agents that most chemical laboratories or most countries' militaries have. This makes it easy to claim your enemies have WMD. I haven't seen anything in Saddam's remaining arsenal that could have inflicted "mass destruction."