I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
Iraqi WMD discovered at the UN
August 31, 2007
That’s really all I can think to say at this exact moment, because the discovery boggles the mind. Intially, I hadn’t thought to comment on the chemical scare that happened at the U.N. building in New York yesterday, but this latest twist makes things more…interesting.
No unconventional weapons were found in Iraq after the United States-led invasion in 2003. But a potentially deadly chemical agent produced by Saddam Hussein’s regime has turned up, improbably, in an office at the United Nations in New York, and it had the F.B.I. and the city police scrambling yesterday.
Federal, city and United Nations officials said the small quantity of the chemical, phosgene, was contained and appeared to pose no immediate danger. But unanswered questions about its risks and about how material from Iraq’s notorious chemical warfare center wound up in New York swirled all the way up to the State Department, the Senate and the White House yesterday.
…
The chemical believed to be phosgene, an old-generation nerve-gas component used extensively in the later stages of World War I and in Iraqi attacks that killed thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s, was discovered in a steel box last Friday by personnel cleaning out files and old boxes in a weapons inspection agency that is to be closed soon, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the agency.
…
The substance, a colorless liquid suspended in oil in a container the size of a soda can that was sealed in a plastic bag, was unmarked except for an inventory number, and nobody knew what it was, Mr. Buchanan said. A check of records indicated that the chemical was phosgene that had been taken by United Nations inspectors in 1996 from Iraq’s chemical weapons facility at Al Muthanna, near Samarra.
Okay, so the headline I chose is a tad on the misleading side, but only slightly. This was a chemical weapon component — chemical weapons being, by definition, weapons of mass destruction — manufactured in Iraq, and it was in fact found at the UN building. Although I guess “discovered” isn’t all that accurate. The chemicals in question have been in UN hands for a while now.
The question, of course, is how it got there. Supposedly taken in 1996 by UN inspectors, how does this vial of chemicals now end up in the open like that?
Eh…it’s Friday. One expects weird news on a day like that.
