Yeah right, no WMD.

You know, I was outraged when I read on the net last night that the democrats have buttons out that say “If you say a lie often enough you’re a republican.” Because if you really look at the rhetoric that comes out of both sides, you can plainly see who the liars are (unless you’re in complete denial), and who is siding with the enemy in this war against terrorism~just consider Karl Rove’s recent statements versus Dick Durbin’s.

But what I want to examine is the plethera of information that’s been ignored by the media about WMD. Actually, I commented in response to someone repeating that tired meme “where’ the WMD”? Well here’s a part of that story that has emerged within the last couple of years, and I’m sure it’s not the entire story. But it’ll give you an idea of just part of what’s been found, that the media has so conveniently ignored in its call for WMD and the tired claims that “Bush lied”.

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein’s regime to work with some of the world’s most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam’s government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support terrorist attacks against Americans in Somalia. The memo was written nine months before U.S. Army Rangers were ambushed in Mogadishu by forces loyal to a warlord with alleged ties to al Qaeda.

Other memos provide a list of terrorist groups with whom Iraq had relationships and considered available for terror operations against the United States.

Among the organizations mentioned are those affiliated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahiri, two of the world’s most wanted terrorists. Zarqawi is believed responsible for the kidnapping and beheading of several American civilians in Iraq and claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombings in Iraq Sept. 30. Al-Zawahiri is the top lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, allegedly helped plan the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strikes on the U.S., and is believed to be the voice on an audio tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television Oct. 1, calling for attacks on U.S. and British interests everywhere.

What the president’s critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find “stockpiles” of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism “a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security.”

The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam “probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons [MT] and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents — much of it added in the last year.”

That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account.

Until now, Bush’s critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration “lied” to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.

But what are “stockpiles” of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English?

Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory?

Stockpiles found

In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority’s intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found – not all at once, and not all in nice working order — but found all the same.

Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.

In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq’s CW stockpiles have indeed been found.

Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.

But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the “finds” Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam’s chemical-weapons “stockpiles” look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.

“Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena,” Hanson says. “In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the ‘grandfather’ of modern-day nerve agents.”

The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides, or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.

When coalition forces entered Iraq, “huge warehouses and caches of ‘commercial and agricultural’ chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists,” Hanson writes. “What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches.”

Caches of “commercial and agricultural” chemicals don’t match the expectation of “stockpiles” of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. “At a very minimum,” Hanson tells Insight, “they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly.”

Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment’s notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large “agricultural supply” area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a “camouflaged bunker complex” that was shown to reporters — with unpleasant results.

“More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,” Hanson says. “But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The ‘agricultural site’ was also colocated with a military ammunition dump — evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.”

That wasn’t the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin — a nerve agent.

Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.

“Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up,” Hanson says. “It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that ‘no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.’”

At Taji — an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia — U.S. combat units discovered more “pesticides” stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum.

Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. “They were labeled as pesticides,” he says. “Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps.”

It seems to me that many libs who come here deriding me for the sources that I provide or any number of small insignificant details that mean nothing when you look at the big picture-just proves they have a superiority complex that needs to be put into perspective here. Constantly picking on my sources saying that you find them unacceptable because you don’t agree with the content doesn’t really make any sense. And guess what? I could give a rip. The fact is, libs are in complete and utter denial about the realities we’re facing in the war on terror, the proven connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda and 9/11, and really, as others have stated here, WMD was not the main focus of what Bush said, it’s the media that have been harping on that stupid mantra. Of course, by “WMD,” what liberals mean is: missiles pointed at Washington, D.C., with their “Ready to Fire” lights blinking ominously and their warhead payloads clearly marked “WMD! Next Stop, The Great Satan America!” bwahahaha! whatever.

On June 9, 2004, Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.

What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam — complete with U.N. inspection tags — and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters — the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

“The problem for us is that we don’t know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere,” Ewen Buchanan, Perricos’s spokesman, said. “We can’t really assess the significance and don’t know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq’s neighbors.”

Perricos isn’t an American shill defending the Bush administration, but rather the acting executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and his report was made to the Security Council. Yet his report didn’t seem to be of much interest to a media which has used the lack of significant discoveries to question the rationale for the war

The report neatly disarms arguments that Hussein’s WMD programs were non-existent after the first Gulf War.

I don’t see any room for ambiguity in the term “Iraqi WMD components.” Just because an item has uses besides manufacturing or dispersing WMDs, it does not follow that it can’t be established that the item was in fact used or intended to manufacture WMDs, or intended to disperse WMDs.

More on Perricos’ findings-released on June 3, 2005. Imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March. Biological sites were less damaged than chemical and missile sites.

53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. “Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents,” he said.

The report said 3,380 valves, 107 pumps, and more than 7.8 miles of pipes were known to have been located at the 39 chemical sites.

A third of the chemical items removed came from the Qaa Qaa industrial complex south of Baghdad which the report said “was among the sites possessing the highest number of dual-use production equipment,” whose fate is now unknown.” Significant quantities of missing material were also located at the Fallujah II and Fallujah III facilities north of the city, which was besieged last year.

Before the first Gulf War in 1991, those facilities played a major part in the production of precursors for Iraq’s chemical warfare program.

The percentages of missing biological equipment from 12 sites were much smaller – no higher than 10 percent.

The report said 37 of 405 fermenters ranging in size from 2 gallons to 1,250 gallons had been removed. Those could be used to produce pharmaceuticals and vaccines as well as biological warfare agents such as anthrax.

The largest percentages of missing items were at the 58 missile facilities, which include some of the key production sites for both solid and liquid propellant missiles, the report said.

For example, 289 of the 340 pieces of equipment to produce missiles – about 85 percent – had been removed, it said.

At the Kadhimiyah and Al Samoud factory sites in suburban Baghdad, where the report said airframes and engines for liquid propellant missiles were manufactured and final assembly was carried out, “all equipment and missile components have been removed.”

Any reasonable person could draw a the conclusion that Saddam moved this stuff–and more than just WMD to Syria. The story is continuing to unfold, but people(liberals in particular) who are in such incredible denial about it and aren’t willing to accept all the signs are behaving like people with their heads in the sand.

Maybe these ostrich-people should take a look at the UN report but even then they’ll probably have a problem with the conclusions drawn, or the time of day, or the color of the eyes of the person writing the report,

Finally, the U.N. admits what the rest of the world (minus the loony left) have known for AT LEAST a year. Prohibited missiles, equipment that would make a bio-terrorist’s heart leap, and yellow cake. Tons of yellowcake. (500 tons of uranium that the Iraqi dictator kept stored at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant. But what do you expect, the press hasn’t made much of Saddam’s 500-ton uranium stockpile, downplaying the story to such an extent that most Americans aren’t even aware of it.) Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, admitted to the BBC earlier in 2004, “We had 500 tons of yellow cake [uranium] in Baghdad.” There was also 1.8 tons of uranium that Saddam had begun to enrich. The U.S. Energy Department considered that stockpile so dangerous that it mounted an unprecedented airlift operation in June or July of 2004 to remove the enriched uranium stash from al Tuwaitha. Kay’s successor, Charles Duelfer, also confirmed that they were conducting nuclear research at al Tuwaitha right up until the U.S. invasion, telling Congress in March that Saddam’s scientists were “preserving and expanding [their] knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons.”

What’s significant about what Always on Watch says about the guy who wrote “The bomb in my garden” is this: After he was captured by U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who ran Saddam’s nuclear centrifuge program until 1997, had some disturbing news for coalition debriefers. He kept blueprints for a nuclear centrifuge, along with some actual centrifuge components, stored at his home – buried in the front yard – awaiting orders from Baghdad to proceed.

“I had to maintain the program to the bitter end,” Obeidi said recently. His only other choice was death.

In his new book, “The Bomb in My Garden,” the Iraqi physicist explains that his nuclear stash was the key that could have unlocked and restarted Saddam’s bombmaking program.

“The centrifuge is the single most dangerous piece of nuclear technology,” he writes. “With advances in centrifuge technology, it is now possible to conceal a uranium enrichment program inside a single warehouse.”

Dr. Obeidi warned in a New York Times op-ed piece that Saddam could have restarted his nuclear program “with a snap of his fingers.”

The 500 ton stockpile could have made 50 nuclear warheads, and it’s no secret that Saddam wanted to be the next Saladin.

One laboratory at al Tuwaitha, Duelfer said, “was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development.”

So…I guess none of this is significant because the sources aren’t good enough and the people who are saying it are people that libs don’t agree with. Let’s see….In July of 2003 the Whitehouse gave this briefing, saying in part, that-the United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax, enough doses to kill several million people. (I guess that’s not a stockpile)–The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin. (hmm I guess that’s not a stockpile) Out intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents. (I guess that’s nothing to worry about, either) U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. From three Iraqi defectors, we know that in Iraq in the late 1990s had several mobile biological weapons labs. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the ’90s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon, was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Yeah right. “No WMD”.

Thanks to Mudville and Outside the Beltway