Winnebagos of Mass Destruction

Only the looniest of right-wing shills are still pushing the WMD line. And even they have long been limited to the "Saddam smuggled them into Syria" line. Which could become the "smuggled into Iran" line soon, now that I think about it.

In other words, stories like this are old news. Most of us have been aware for years that the whole WMD line was bogus from day one. The only problem is that mainstream pundits seem to have forgotten Condi's 'mushroom cloud' warnings, and Cheney's assurances that a Kerry victory would mean terrorists on our doorsteps. Now the WaPo, by way of further stripping the White House of credibility, prints a memorable quote from Bush himself (emphasis mine):

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

Every justification the Bushies ever set forth for starting a war in Iraq has been blown to hell-- and a thousand times over, at that. But the chattering class still pretends that objectivity and fairness mean reporting the administration's appalling lies as "one side of the story."