By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s
staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
admits Wired's Noah Shachtman (shookhran to
Instapundit).
But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents
reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical
weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover
weapons of mass destruction.
An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD
program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most
(in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons,
especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of
Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War,
remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian)
agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may
have brewed up their own deadly agents.
… even late in the war, WMDs were still
being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked
report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents.
“These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime.
Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache.
However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have
been moved for a long time.”
A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained
that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the
American people were led to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators
gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.
The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these
newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively
small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush
administration presented in the run-up to the war. …
The main conclusion to be taken from this, however, is neither the first note nor the second one. It is that the Mainstream media deliberately ignored any discussion or even the slightest consideration of the findings to hammer home their (self-serving) obstruction to the White House when it was the home of a Republican of George W Bush's bent…
