Sunday, October 24, 2010

New evidence of WMD in Iraq

Wired:

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. In fact, I've been expecting reports of additional WMD discoveries for years and I'm surprised it's taken so long. I also predict that there will be more of them.

Note that I said additional WMD discoveries. That's because the accepted "fact" that there were never any WMD to begin with has been a willful distortion from the very start. In truth, there were a number of reports citing evidence of WMD in the early part of the war. There were satellite pics of truck convoys exiting Iraq across the Syrian border on the eve of the invasion. There were AP reports of WMD being captured as they were smuggled out of Iraq into Kuwait. There was evidence of WMD projects found in documents of which millions of pages had yet to be translated. But all these stories, and the logical follow up to them went largely ignored as the "official" story emerged that there simply weren't any WMD. I remember linking to an Investor's Daily story which concluded,

Oh, but we didn't find WMDs?

On the contrary, U.S. troops found more than 500 weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. True, we didn't find an operational nuclear weapon, but U.N. inspectors found lots of equipment and plans clearly showing that Iraq had been working on one — and intended to do so again.

I recall reading one report disclosing the discovery of tons of chemicals buried underground. These chemicals were described as "dual use" agents because they could technically be used as either WMD or fertilizer. The fertilizer explanation was given as the more likely one, without any speculation as to why it might be necessary to hide tons of fertilizer in an underground bunker, or why said "fertilizer" was buried next to a bunch of warheads which could be used as delivery devices.

So the fact that there is more of this stuff out there is hardly surprising. Maybe Bush has been out of office long enough now so that it's finally okay to start reporting on it.

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