Vocal Voices

That's less than a week and now the President of France and a bunch of other sources are saying that IS is trying to gain chemical weapons....

That would be WMD to you and me. Or Weapons of mass destruction...

Haven't we heard that one before?

The most likely place for IS to have gained WMD is from the rebels who took over a bunch of those stores from Assad. Remember Assad was forced to surrender his but the rebels were not....

I don't like convenient little stories which suddenly surface when action is the best political path. If true, we need to deal with it, certainly. But they didn't deal with it when they knew that Islamic fundamentalist rebels had taken them from Assad, including Al Qaeda.

If they want to convince me, they need to show the independently verified and dated reports from before the Paris attacks. We already have more than enough cause to bomb them off the face of the planet. Let's not get caught up on fairy stories which, when proven untrue, stop us from acting when we need to and leading to the kind of mess we are in now.

When the chemical weapons clean up was being carried out in Syria we saw drums of powders and old Soviet era artillery shells and so on. There was not anything that could be easily transported out of Syria and usable on the streets of European cities, so that side of things is a bit of a non-story.

However, the makings of rudimentary chemical weapons are readily available from agricultural suppliers, industrial cleaning supplies and even the local supermarket. Keeping and eye on who is buying what might not be a bad idea.Set off in an enclosed space, the London tube, concert venue or a railway station, they would certainly cause panic, some horrendous injuries and probably kill a few.