Yes, I know this.
But none of that diminishes in any way the fact that Iraq had 500 tons of yellowcake uranium at a nuclear weapons development plant. Do they only count as WMDs if Saddam himself was actually standing there in the process of enriching them to weapons-grade at the moment we invaded?
I'm sure those tags and seals would have stopped Saddam's scientists from digging up a centrifuge or two out of their flowerpots and whipping up a little dirty bomb to give to Zarqawi as a hospitality gift next time he was in Baghdad recovering from a broken leg as a guest of the regime.
We also found barrels upon barrels of chemicals essential to chemical-weapons manufacturing in munitions supply facilities all across Iraq. Of course, they were labeled as "pesticides" so they were ignored as WMDs because everybody knows what a tremendous cockroach problem ammo dumps in the desert tend to have.
Iraq had WMDs. It is a fact.
I'm sorry that they didn't have enough WMDs for you, or that they were not actually loaded onto missiles and targeted directly at U.S. cities so as to "count" as WMDs, or that Saddam didn't leave them sitting around in big boxes labeled "WMDs for Killing the Great Satan" in the same places where the administration publicly announced they were while we took 14 months to ask everybody and their mother if we could, pretty please, invade Iraq.
The Bush admin has screwed a whole helluva lot of stuff up in this war (Fallujah should still be a big smoking crater IMHO), but Iraq had WMDs. Just because they were still wrapped in plastic or labeled "pool chlorine" doesn't mean they weren't there.
"I'm sorry that they didn't have enough WMDs for you, or that they were not actually loaded onto missiles and targeted directly at U.S. cities so as to "count" as WMDs, or that Saddam didn't leave them sitting around in big boxes labeled "WMDs for Killing the Great Satan" in the same places where the administration publicly announced they were while we took 14 months to ask everybody and their mother if we could, pretty please, invade Iraq."
Wow. A little defensive, aren't we? Especially since I didn't say any of the things you attribute to me, so you apparently just felt the need to make them up.
But, since you are on such an unsupported rant, let me address a couple of your points:
Your post that I responded to was about 'mistaken intelligence' and what you perceived to be an effort by the MSM to neglect certain 'intelligence.' You used the al-Tuwaitha material as your example.
The al-Tuwaitha material has nothing to do with 'intelligence', mistaken or otherwise. We didn't need intel to know what was at al-Tuwaitha. We already knew. IAEA already knew. Iraq acknowledged what was there in its disclosures. So your point about the information being 'neglected' is just utterly and completely wrong.
Second, you are being remarkably loose with your language, and I suspect intentionally. Since you are talking about 'WMD' you might want to stop for just a moment and consider what those letters stand for. Yellowcake uranium is not a weapon. Precursor chemicals are not weapons. Parts of centrifuges in flowerpots are not weapons. There is no doubt that Hussein tried to avoid completely dismantling his programs. But he didn't have stockpiles. He didn't even have operational programs. He had some ability to restart operational programs at some point in the future. That's our own government's conclusion.
But, I guess you know a lot more about it than ISG does. At least, that's what you'd have us believe.