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June 22, 2006

Holy Grail Found in Iraq

Senator Rick Santorum, in a hastily called press conference late yesterday, proudly announced to the world that we have found WMDs in Iraq.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Obviously, the first question one would ask is why, with WMDs being the reason we went to war and with all the criticism Bush has received for not having found them, would we not have been told about this sooner?

Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq. Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

Something stinks here. Reading on, we learn what that stinky thing is.

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

From now on, however, whenever anyone says we haven't found WMDs in Iraq, the "Christian" liars like Santorum will say they are the ones who are lying. You lose your audience when you have to start having to give caveats and explanations, and these guys know that (remember the hay made over "I voted for it before I voted against it"?). Santorum is already gloating undeservedly over the find.

Santorum pointed out that during Wednesday's debate, several Senate Democrats said that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, a claim, he said, that the declassified document proves is untrue.

"This is an incredibly — in my mind — significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," he said.

And so another brick is laid in the wall between wingers and thinkers.

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Marty Kaplan at the Huffington Post offers a related editorial that is well worth a read.

Posted by Becky at June 22, 2006 07:28 AM