When it makes America look bad, two guys on the street in Baghdad is enough confirmation to go with a headline. When the evidence looks like it's going against the agenda, suddenly everybody needs to see the other side of the house to make sure the whole thing is painted white.

Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining. The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.

Let's see: we have a unexploded shell which apparently contained a binary that had not mixed. In other words ALL of these things would have to go wrong if this was in fact a "fired" shell.

Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production. Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors. And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur. So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.

So, in all of Iraq, these guys managed to find one of fifteen of these shells just laying around in the desert? What kind of live nerve gas test would not involve recovery of the spent shell if it did not burst?

Ritter is really reaching here. It's not surprising, since he has bet his professional ass on the premise that there are NO WMD in Iraq.

Of course, that's today's Scott Ritter.