Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Not Missing: Moved (Saddam's WMD are missing only because we haven't looked in the right places)
The American Prowler ^ | 6/13/2005 | Jed Babbin

Posted on 06/13/2005 1:49:51 AM PDT by nickcarraway

For those of us who are occasional targets of the Soros-funded propaganda machines, it's encouraging to discover a useful purpose that they can serve. The hyperlib machinery, and the reactions it commands, are as accurate a gauge as I can find to measure the import of the key points of the liberal dogma. As demonstrated by the reaction they manufactured to some comments I made on MSNBC last week, the volume of hate mail the organized hyperlibs generate is directly proportional to the importance they assign to an issue and the weakness of their position.

At issue was the so-called "Downing Street memo," a top-secret Brit document memorializing a meeting in July 2002. The document says that the decision to take military action against Saddam had already been made two months before we took the case of Iraq to the UN Security Council. It is as significant historically as Nick Nolte's DUI record, and far less accurate. After Ron Reagan pressed me to admit our casus belli was a tissue of lies, I told him that the fact we haven't found Saddam's WMD proved precisely nothing. That's so, I said, because while we fiddled and diddled in the UN for six months before military action began, Saddam almost certainly moved all his WMD and scrubbed away all the evidence of it.

When Reagan pressed me further, contending that none of the commissions investigating the missing WMD said they had been moved, I cited the report of Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, which spent many months searching for WMD in Iraq. That report, I said, showed the substantial body of evidence that a lot of people, money, and materials, possibly including WMD, were smuggled out of Iraq in the months before March 2003. The destination of these cargoes was Syria. I had touched a nerve: by the time I got home, the "Media Matters for America" blog had accused me of lying, and dozens of nearly identical e-mails (on the intellectual plane of, "liar, liar, pants on fire") were pouring in. I quickly stopped reading them and just hit "delete" when I saw them.

I hadn't merely touched a hyperlib nerve. I had challenged the basis for the hyperlibs' existence: to discredit George Bush and the war at any cost. But the problem, for them, is that I had stuck to the facts. Which are very uncomfortable things, if you're Soros or Howard Dean. Or any of their Michael Mooron drones. Having demonstrated that I can drive them into a fit of apoplectic rage with a 30-second comment on television, the scientific method requires a controlled, repeatable experiment to see how many can be driven to nervous breakdowns with a more elaborate exposition of the facts. In the interest of science, let us proceed.

WHAT I SAID ON MSNBC was, of course, just what the Duelfer's ISG report said, and what Duelfer has said personally and repeatedly in Congressional testimony. You can look it up. On November 17, 2004, Duelfer told the House International Relations Committee that a lot was moved by Saddam's people from Iraq into Syria and no one knows whether or not the WMD were among the shipments to Syria: "I can't confirm anything one way or the other. What we do know is that a lot of stuff was crossing the border before the war. Trucks, but you don't know what was in them. So that's -- you know, I would like to be able to state definitively one way or the other an answer to that. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to." On October 6, 2004, Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "...But what I can tell you that I believe we know is a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points. We've got a lot of data to support that, including people discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say."

Duelfer's report also said that Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service "operated a series of laboratories in the Baghdad area" (up to five in that area alone) and that one of them, a clandestine lab in the Baghdad Central Public Health Laboratory, was "emptied of all equipment and documents in December 2002," and that other labs were also found in the scrubbed-clean-of-evidence condition.

The only reasonable conclusion anyone can draw from the Duelfer report -- even if we ignore the other mountains of evidence about Saddam’s WMD -- is that Saddam had WMD and in the six months we spent trying to convince Kofi, Dominique, and their pals to act, Saddam's regime moved the WMD, cleaned out the evidence, and did their best to conceal what they had done. That they did so with the active participation of Assad's Syria is also terribly clear.

It is a pity that the embittered hyperlibs can't accept facts or use them to assemble the logical, and inevitable, conclusions to which they lead. When any of them -- Soros, Moore, Dean, Franken, or any of them -- call a conservative a liar, it must create a rebuttable presumption that it is the lib who is falsifying. Not that they care.

Jed Babbin, a contributing editor of The American Spectator, was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and now often appears as a talking warhead on MSNBC.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: bush; duelferreport; husseiniraq; jedbabbin; saddam; wmd
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-85 next last
To: Straight Vermonter

I appreciate your premise, yet will decline from agreement. If found where ever, there is always a chain of evidence. May we never find out who is correcto-mundo, by unleased circumstance,for this I pray...


21 posted on 06/13/2005 3:12:45 AM PDT by Treader (Hillary's dark smile is reminiscent of Stalin's inhuman grin...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: Treader; Straight Vermonter
All WMDs leave a traceable signature of manufacture, even after usage. Didn't know that did ya?

Well, no. I didn't know that since to my knowledge that is a false statement (in the sense that the signature would be unique to Iraqi WMDs), but even to whatever extent it may be true, unless we have a signature to compare them against, any WMDs might as well be from Kiribati for all we would know...

We need to find verifiably Iraqi WMDs before we have any kind of signature of manufacture against which to compare WMDs found in, say, Syria. If we had verifiably Iraqi WMDs to compare against, we wouldn't be having this conversation..

22 posted on 06/13/2005 3:12:48 AM PDT by AntiGuv (™)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway


.. going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.
-Jed Babbin, former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration


23 posted on 06/13/2005 3:13:31 AM PDT by traviskicks (http://www.neoperspectives.com/charterschoolsexplained.htm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv

Let's hope that is the scenario! It was all smoke and mirrors- just to get to those Iraqi oil reservations, right?


24 posted on 06/13/2005 3:16:44 AM PDT by Treader (Hillary's dark smile is reminiscent of Stalin's inhuman grin...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: WonkyTonky

They have the capability today! An UNSCOM report recently released confirmed this. However, they noted that it would be in small batches (not large enough for military needs) and could be used by small groups or individuals!


25 posted on 06/13/2005 3:20:15 AM PDT by endthematrix (Thank you US armed forces, for everything you give and have given!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: endthematrix

What comparable sample signatures do we have? This is starting to sound like an urban legend to me. LOL

A nerve agent of a given type has the same chemical composition as any other nerve agent of that given type, no matter where it originates.

Botulinum toxin is botulinum toxin. Period. There are four strains that afflict humans and two that afflict animals (and one that's not known to have caused disease). The Syrians could get their hands on any one of them just as well as the Iraqis, so there would be no way to distinguish.

The same goes for aflatoxin producing microbes and to a lesser extent anthrax. Known anthrax strains are traceable, but none of them can be restricted exclusively to Iraq.

What else is there?


26 posted on 06/13/2005 3:20:34 AM PDT by AntiGuv (™)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: Treader

I think it was just pure 100% incompetence, myself.


27 posted on 06/13/2005 3:21:34 AM PDT by AntiGuv (™)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv
" If we had verifiably Iraqi WMDs to compare against, we wouldn't be having this conversation.."

What? You still don't know we have that stuff? Anthax, Sarin, Mustard, Uranium?

28 posted on 06/13/2005 3:23:11 AM PDT by endthematrix (Thank you US armed forces, for everything you give and have given!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv

Arrrg! I'm at the end of my "work" shift and my boss will be here in like five minutes...and it's the weekend for me pal. I'll try to get info stat!


29 posted on 06/13/2005 3:25:44 AM PDT by endthematrix (Thank you US armed forces, for everything you give and have given!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 26 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv

By the by, Iraq did not invent any weapons of mass destruction- all materials were "inherited" from somewhere else- all those signatures are better recognized than dna- regardless of subtle change by manufacture evolution.


30 posted on 06/13/2005 3:26:06 AM PDT by Treader (Hillary's dark smile is reminiscent of Stalin's inhuman grin...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

Important article.


31 posted on 06/13/2005 3:29:01 AM PDT by sauropod (De gustibus non est disputandum)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Straight Vermonter; AntiGuv
Re: "The location of manufacture"

This was more the line I was explaining. I have to sign off - it's the weekend for me!
32 posted on 06/13/2005 3:30:22 AM PDT by endthematrix (Thank you US armed forces, for everything you give and have given!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: endthematrix
The Ames strain of anthrax which was known to have been used by Iraq was not exclusive to Iraq. The first hint should've been that it's named after a town in Iowa....

The same applies to any other strain of anthrax.

This is sarin, no matter where it's found or where it came from:

This is mustard gas, no matter where it's found or where it came from:

This is yellowcake, no matter where it's found or where it came from:


33 posted on 06/13/2005 3:30:38 AM PDT by AntiGuv (™)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 28 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

Democrat "logic": Osama Bin Laden does not exist because we haven't found him yet.


34 posted on 06/13/2005 3:43:28 AM PDT by libertylover (Liberal: A blatant liar who likes to spend other people's money.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv
let's also suppose that a terrorist attack is launched from within Syria against Jordan, via ground (truck) borne delivery, and this attack is thankfully prevented, vermin captured, etc. The ensueing investigation shows the lethality of the attack enough to take out something like 20 square blocks and was targetted against government buildings. The composition of the bio-chem agents are of such a nature that no intelligence agency in the world shows documentation that the Syrians were working on that particular type of weapon, but that Iraq was. Let's then suppose that the media squashes this story for about 10 days, whereas Patriot internet like Free Republic report it almost immediately - and when they finally get around to reporting it, key elements of the story are slushed around in typical leftist/MSM, "hide-it-below-the-fold" manner

Oh, wait... this actually DID happen, just the way I'm "supposing..." above.

CGVet58

35 posted on 06/13/2005 3:44:56 AM PDT by CGVet58 (God has granted us Liberty, and we owe Him Courage in return)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv

"I think it was just pure 100% incompetence, myself." I admire your confidence level. Care to briefly expound on your thought of "...pure 100% incompetence?" I would love to learn something bold and new on this subject.


36 posted on 06/13/2005 3:52:21 AM PDT by Treader (Hillary's dark smile is reminiscent of Stalin's inhuman grin...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 27 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway
"...the basis for the hyperlibs' existence: to discredit George Bush and the war at any cost."

They were the same with Reagan. It doesn't matter how noble or how necessary the actions of a Republican administration. The left can't let Conservatives/Republicans win. That is perhaps the key difference between conservatives and liberals: liberals will unfailingly put their quest/lust for political power ahead of everything else, be it country or even the very beliefs they claim to hold dear.

37 posted on 06/13/2005 3:53:59 AM PDT by GBA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Treader

They expected rose petals and champagne corks, but got bullets and carbombs instead. Why anyone should expect otherwise from Islamists is beyond me. They aren't even permitted to have champagne, for that matter. LOL


38 posted on 06/13/2005 3:58:53 AM PDT by AntiGuv (™)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies]

To: nickcarraway

Not only what Duelfer said in his report but David Kay's report said many things also that surely would not leave anyone "sure" that Sadman never had WMDs. Unless you were a liberal... of course.


39 posted on 06/13/2005 4:01:20 AM PDT by BillyCrockett
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: AntiGuv

Your cynicism is deep and abiding. Apparently, my crown has been given to you. Great regards to ya...thorny bastard, ain't it?!


40 posted on 06/13/2005 4:16:36 AM PDT by Treader (Hillary's dark smile is reminiscent of Stalin's inhuman grin...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-85 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson