WMDs: Santorum and Hoekstra Give It The Old College Try

I am mostly posting this for posterity because in the coming months and years we can expect the right-wing to cling to the lie that we found the WMDs in Iraq that we were looking for. The history of this war is a history of lies, from the ones that helped to start it to the endless ones used to rejustify and defend it since. In the latter category, revisionist history has played a big role... we've heard many lies in this area: President Bush didn't want war, Congress had the same intel he did, Bush/Cheney never said that Iraq or Saddam were connected to 9/11, Rumsfeld never said he knew where the WMDs were, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, etc etc. All false; all spouted proudly as Bible truth by the Bush cultists.

Now comes the next big lie- courtesy of Sen. Rick Santorum, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and Fox News- that we found the WMDs in Iraq.

WOW! Huge news, right? Here's the Fox article-
Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq

Santorum and Hoekstra proudly announced that a declassified report showed that weapons had been found in Iraq... President Bush just didn't want to tell anyone for national security and classification reasons (one military analyst for Fox even claimed that the administration covered the findings up to protect France, Russia, and China- what a nice guy!). At this point alone, it should've been obvious that the story is bunk. We know from the mobile labs debacle in May 2003 in which President Bush declared "We have found the weapons of mass destruction" (even though his office had already received a memo informing him that was not the case), that he has no problem lying jumping the gun if it will help save his case for war. If there was even a 0.0001% chance we had found the WMDs, the President would've immediately landed on an aircraft carrier inside the Green Zone and held a press conference to be broadcast worldwide with a glorious banner of vindication behind him.

Therefore it should not be surprising that the story has already been debunked.

In an appearance on Hannity & Colmes (in which Mr. Hannity breathlessly lauded Sen. Santorum for his discovery), Alan Colmes deflated the Senator's bubble by announcing to him that the Defense Department had already disowned the report. Colmes reported that "Jim Angle, who reported this for Fox News, quotes a defense official who says these were pre-1991 weapons that could not have been fired as designed because they already been degraded. And the official went on to say that they are- these 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. So the chest beating that the Republicans are doing tonight thinking this is a justification is not confirmed by the Defense Department."

Sen. Santorum was stunned. His last big hurrah was turning into another embarrassment.

Keith Olbermann also did a report with a lengthier Defense Dept. official quote.

Knight-Ridder reports further-

A new, partially declassified intelligence report provides no new evidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion, as President Bush alleged in making the case for war, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday...

...But the intelligence officials said the munitions dated from before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and were for the most part badly deteriorated. "They are not in a condition where they could be used as designed," one intelligence official said.

"There is not new news from the coalition point of view," one official said, noting that chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer predicted in a March 2005 report that such vintage weapons would continue to be found...

..Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, charged Thursday that Republicans' release of the report was a last-ditch effort to justify the war.

"Rolling out some old fairly toxic stuff sounds to me like a desperate claim by those who wish that we could find some new way to rationalize the ongoing devastation in Iraq," she said.

And there you go. Unless what President Bush said to the UN in 2002/2003 was "We believe Saddam Hussein has some musty 15-year-old weapons lying around. We must deal with this crisis immediately.", this story is over. In addition, this is not the first time we have found remnants of old munitions. As the Knight-Ridder report notes, this was to be expected. And it's unrelated to the case that the White House made for war (which included new WMD stockpiles, a nuclear program, yellowcake, uranium from Africa, aluminum tubes, etc)... On a final note, as pre-'91 weapons, it's almost certain that they include many of the weapons that we had sold/given to Saddam in the 1980's, so if I were Santorum, I wouldn't go flashing them around.

Meanwhile, Steve Soto at Left Coaster ponders the politics of this announcement.

Finally, Glenn Greenwald and Anonymous Liberal throroughly analyze this story, including the statements from both sides. The latter states in conclusion that "This is how GOP political propaganda works. You hype a completely trivial fact in an entirely misleading way in order to make a point that is the opposite of the truth. The claim is then repeated by the unscrupulous and the confused, and a significant percentage of the public ends up hearing it. The next day the claim is debunked in a story on page A10 of the paper, but by then the damage has already been done. Wash, rinse, repeat." Bingo. Just as polls continue to show that a shocking percentage of Americans still believe that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, once the propaganda has been internalized, it is very hard for the truth to override it.

It is for that reason that this is important. Like the revisionism and lies mentioned at the beginning, the falsehood of Santorum and Hoekstra's report will not deter President Bush's defenders from continuing to insist that we found the WMDs after all. We must continue to show that the truth is otherwise. The President made a false case for a unnecessary and preemptive war that continues to implode upon itself.

Luckily for all of us, it seems that their report has convinced few.

[Related- New intel report reignites Iraq arms fight (AP)]