Another Damascus Road Conversion?
Judging by this New York Times story, I guess Big Media has decided that there's no more mileage to be squeezed out of the "BUSH LIED!!!!!" canard.
In a stunning about-face, the New York Times reported Sunday that when the U.S. attacked Iraq in March 2003, Saddam Hussein possessed "stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials," as well as sophisticated equipment to manufacture nuclear and biological weapons, which was removed to "a neighboring state" before the U.S. could secure the weapons sites.
The U.N.'s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission [UNMOVIC] "has filed regular reports to the Security Council since last May," the paper said, "about the dismantlement of important weapons installations and the export of dangerous materials to foreign states." [my emphases]
Well, well, well. Shazam! I could have sworn that such "discredited" sources as debka.com were reporting this over an f'ing year ago. I cited Debka's report numerous times in online debate at Republican Forum to the mindless lefty wingnuts, to no avail (not that I expected scales to fall from eyes and all that - that was the frenzied height of Bushophobia, after all, when you couldn't convince those people that Dubya didn't have horns, cloven hooves, and a forked tail. Hell, the President could have posed nude in Playgirl magazine and they'd have claimed that those satanic physical traits had been "airbrushed out" as part of the overall master neocon conspiracy....).
This was aside from the simple, straightforward, Occam's Razor common sense of putting oneself in Saddam's place and asking why you'd have played shell games with UN weapons inspectors for all those years if you didn't have any WMDs to begin with, and what you'd have done with them when the American invasion really did appear imminent. The most obvious answer is stashing them in your neighboring Ba'athist sister state, which is made all the more obvious by the fact that the Saddamite side of the Iraqi "insurgency" has been operating from Syrian territory.
Apparently it must also have been obvious to the UN, since they're still worriedly looking for them:
"Officials of the commission and the [International] Atomic Energy Agency have repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to report on what it knows of the fate of the thousands of pieces of monitored equipment and stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials."
Last fall, IAEA director Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that "nuclear-related materials" had gone missing from monitored sites, calling on Iraqi officials to start the process of accounting for the missing stockpiles still ostensibly under the agency's supervision.
Quoting Sami al-Araji, Iraq's deputy minister of industry since the 1980s, the Times said:
"It appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away."
Calling the operation "sophisticated," Dr. Araji said the removal effort featured "cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," adding, "They knew what they were doing."
The top Iraqi defense official said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's WMD program.
Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state. [my emphasis again - if I could burn it into Michael Moore's forehead, I would...]
The United Nations, worried that the nuclear material and equipment could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it throughout the Middle East, largely unsuccessfully, the Times said.
Never mind the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon - this "stunning about-face" by the flagship of Big Media liberalism is the most dramatic manifestation yet of the spectacular success of the Bush Doctrine - and an indication that the "Gray Lady" thinks that success is going to continue.
In a stunning about-face, the New York Times reported Sunday that when the U.S. attacked Iraq in March 2003, Saddam Hussein possessed "stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials," as well as sophisticated equipment to manufacture nuclear and biological weapons, which was removed to "a neighboring state" before the U.S. could secure the weapons sites.
The U.N.'s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission [UNMOVIC] "has filed regular reports to the Security Council since last May," the paper said, "about the dismantlement of important weapons installations and the export of dangerous materials to foreign states." [my emphases]
Well, well, well. Shazam! I could have sworn that such "discredited" sources as debka.com were reporting this over an f'ing year ago. I cited Debka's report numerous times in online debate at Republican Forum to the mindless lefty wingnuts, to no avail (not that I expected scales to fall from eyes and all that - that was the frenzied height of Bushophobia, after all, when you couldn't convince those people that Dubya didn't have horns, cloven hooves, and a forked tail. Hell, the President could have posed nude in Playgirl magazine and they'd have claimed that those satanic physical traits had been "airbrushed out" as part of the overall master neocon conspiracy....).
This was aside from the simple, straightforward, Occam's Razor common sense of putting oneself in Saddam's place and asking why you'd have played shell games with UN weapons inspectors for all those years if you didn't have any WMDs to begin with, and what you'd have done with them when the American invasion really did appear imminent. The most obvious answer is stashing them in your neighboring Ba'athist sister state, which is made all the more obvious by the fact that the Saddamite side of the Iraqi "insurgency" has been operating from Syrian territory.
Apparently it must also have been obvious to the UN, since they're still worriedly looking for them:
"Officials of the commission and the [International] Atomic Energy Agency have repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to report on what it knows of the fate of the thousands of pieces of monitored equipment and stockpiles of monitored chemicals and materials."
Last fall, IAEA director Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that "nuclear-related materials" had gone missing from monitored sites, calling on Iraqi officials to start the process of accounting for the missing stockpiles still ostensibly under the agency's supervision.
Quoting Sami al-Araji, Iraq's deputy minister of industry since the 1980s, the Times said:
"It appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away."
Calling the operation "sophisticated," Dr. Araji said the removal effort featured "cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," adding, "They knew what they were doing."
The top Iraqi defense official said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's WMD program.
Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state. [my emphasis again - if I could burn it into Michael Moore's forehead, I would...]
The United Nations, worried that the nuclear material and equipment could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it throughout the Middle East, largely unsuccessfully, the Times said.
Never mind the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon - this "stunning about-face" by the flagship of Big Media liberalism is the most dramatic manifestation yet of the spectacular success of the Bush Doctrine - and an indication that the "Gray Lady" thinks that success is going to continue.
posted by JASmius at 8:37 PM
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