Monday, August 22, 2005

Iraqi WMD Have Been Discovered, Buried …on Page 18 (or 32)

It turns out (thanks to RV) that
U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians.
And where does the Washington Post choose to place Ellen Knickmeyer's article? That's right, deep inside the paper, on page 18.

As I noted back in April 2004, when Le Monde had information from experts casting doubt on the charge that WMD was nothing but a pretext for masking Bush's lies or the neocons' delusions, it managed to bury the article devoted to that piece of news on page 32.

In the WP article, Knickmeyer reminds her readers of the well-known (and uncontroversial) fact that

Iraqi forces under Hussein used chemical agents both on enemy forces in the 1980s war with Iran and on Iraqi Kurdish villagers in 1988
which, of course, was the reason that Europeans and Democrats fully supported policies to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

As Captain's Quarters points out,

The size of this find makes it a significant development, both for the insurgency as it stands now and the sourcing of these chemical components. We may have some radical rethinking to do about the nature of not just the terrorists in Iraq, but also the war narrative that said Saddam had no WMD available for his use.

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