Why Bush De-Emphasized Iraqi WMD

In short, he lost them:

Between March and July 2003, [David Garbautz] says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one twenty miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.

This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried twenty to thirty feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

‘There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there’, says Mr Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological materials they said were buried underground.

‘They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the US to remove them,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity — gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there.’

There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration. The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

So where did all this stuff go? Cap'n Ed has an intriguing speculation:

Unguarded, the sites got raided by Iraqi and Syrian forces, aided by Russian intel. The weapons material got shipped to Syria, in a location Garbauzt insists is known to American intelligence forces. The ironic result of the screw-up is that a terror-supporting nation has its hands on WMD, and could easily pass it to its radical-Islamist terror proxies, Hamas or Hezbollah.

Which would explain why the White House went so limp on the WMD issue so quickly and never took it up again. To push it would have brought this stupendous, monumental f-up to the surface smack in the middle of Bush's re-election campaign, atomizing beyond repair his advantage on national security and handing the presidency to Jean-Forbes Kerry on a silver serving tray, even despite how much lungpower the Donks invested in the long, interminable "BUSH LIED!!!!!" meme. Indeed, they would have dismissed it as a pathetic attempt to cover up his "lie" about Saddam's WMD. Going flaccid instead effectively ran out the clock and crossed the bridge over troubled waters to the second term.

What piques my curiosity is Morrissey's preceding graf:

Garbautz wrote sixty classified reports about what he found in those fortified bunkers under the Euphrates. None of them can be found now. Garbautz isn't sure if the destruction of his reports were accidental, done while the Air Force evacuated a base where the digital files were stored, or deliberate in order to keep things quiet. Even a Congressional investigation hit a brick wall at the CIA, which grudgingly admitted in 2005 that Garbautz' reports had indeed disappeared. [emphases added]

Not to be sensationalistic or anything, but this is the kind of covert op you would attribute to an enemy intelligence service. Is it possible that the Syrians, Iranians, or Russians (or, heck, even the ChiComms) could have gotten their hands on, or destroyed, these reports so that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be more easy to discredit? The motivation would be there, certainly, but the capability? It'd be within the realm of possibility, I guess, but not by much.

Is there anybody else, any other faction that would have the desire to discredit the liberation of Iraq? Besides the Democrat Party and its moles in the Bush intelligence bureaucracy? Hmmm; can't think of any, off the top of my head.

Rush Limbaugh found it "shocking" that Dirty Harry Reid would pronounce the war on the Iraqi front "lost". I didn't; he and his treacherous ilk have been saying things like that for the past six years, and it didn't keep them from regaining power last November; hell, why would he start practicing discretion now? But dissident elements within the American "intelligence community" tossing verified, corroborated reports on Saddam Hussein's entire WMD apparatus, programs, and arsenals down a black hole - resulting in the loss of it all to another enemy power with terrorist connections - for no other reason than partisan domestic politics and ideological zealotry?

That should be shocking. The disquieting thing is that it really isn't. Indeed, by the logic of Bushophobia, it was inevitable. A major American political party is waging war against its country, using as their effigy its twice-elected president, by every means as its declared foreign enemy except mortors, machine-guns, and car bombs. Plus, sooner or later, Saddam Hussein's WMD. And all in an eternal drive for domestic political power - a strategy that, last November, was finally rewarded with success.

Now THAT's shocking.

And something tells me we haven't seen ANYthing yet.