Turf war keeping lid on evidence of WMD in Iraq?

If you thought Democrats and Republicans were politically divided over the war in Iraq, you haven't seen anything yet. The real battle apparently is being waged under the radar between the White House, the intelligence community and Congress. ADVERTISEMENT

At the center of the current skirmish is a newly unclassified document released last Wednesday that seems to confirm evidence of WMD in Saddam's Iraq, including both degraded and possibly lethal chemical agents.

According to the document, coalition forces have recovered some 500 weapons munitions since 2003 that contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agents. Other key points are that these chemical agents could be used outside Iraq and that "most likely munitions remaining are sarin- and mustard-filled projectiles."

Which is to say, we don't know what other stores may remain, or where they are, or who else may know about them.

Most significant, perhaps, is the assertion that while agents degrade over time, "chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," according to the released document.

In other words, the word "degraded" doesn't necessarily mean "nothing to worry about." Moreover, Wednesday's document is but a small piece of a much larger document that remains classified and that Republican insiders consider "very significant."

The unclassified document was released Wednesday by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., to thin fanfare and much speculation. Why are we hearing about these findings only now? Why is the White House so quiet about them?

Those questions have had congressional offices buzzing the past couple of days, while theories have offered little comfort or clarity.

To answer the first question, we might not be hearing about the document at all if not for the persistent hammering by Santorum, who has spent more than two months hounding intelligence officials to declassify them.

Santorum heard about the documents from an unnamed source and sought the help of Hoekstra, who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

One would imagine that, given the importance of WMD, the White House would be happy to spread the news. Instead, all has been relatively quiet on the presidential front. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley commented Thursday only that the document "is what it is."

"It's really all we can say about it. And I think people are going to have to draw their own conclusions. But the bottom line is, 500 chemical munitions in Iraq, and obviously we're concerned about the potential threat they pose to Iraqis and to our forces."

Later in the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed during a press conference that the reports are accurate. "They are weapons of mass destruction ... and it shows Saddam Hussein did not declare all his weapons," he said.

Santorum and Hoekstra promise to keep pushing for more details from this document, as well as other captured Iraqi data, media and maps from Saddam Hussein's regime.

The document that Santorum and Hoekstra circulated makes clear that these are pre-Gulf War munitions. Thus, they were not necessarily part of an ongoing WMD program. On the other hand, old chemical programs can be reinstituted relatively easily where remnants remain.

If the White House and the Republican congressional leaders can't agree on what constitutes evidence of WMD, what's a divided America to think?

Conventional wisdom on the Republican side of the Hill is that something isn't quite kosher at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The White House response — companion to "staying the course" — is that the president "never looks back." He is, they say, "forward-looking."

Translated, President George W. Bush doesn't have to explain himself, especially if new evidence suggests he was right all along. Other theories tilt toward the CYA school of thought — that American intelligence would prefer to keep such documents under wraps to hide yet more intelligence failures.

In a June 5 letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, Santorum urged that these materials be released and hinted that territorial politics seemed to be taking precedence over national security. He wrote:

"While some of this information had been defined as 'For Official Use Only,' my staff has learned that many of the captured Iraqi documents have been reclassified and are not to be released until each classified section 'owned' by an agency has been reviewed and cleared for release."

Only a few with security clearance, Santorum among them, know what is in these various documents. Given the importance of what is suggested here, one can only wonder why the president resists declassifying what can only help the current debate about how to proceed in Iraq.

A new and improved White House maxim might go something like this: Sometimes one has to look back in order to go forward.

Also, I am not sure of the specific munitions found in Iraq. I would think if they were the binary type of shells, the chemicals are kept separate and would not be subjected to the same type of degredation over time. Storage and handling were one of the reasons they were designed that way.

I have been saying the same thing here on FR for over two years. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Or the top of a mountain of WMD that may still be hidden in Iraq.

I heard Congressman Curt Weldon on Michael Savage this week. He said that most of Saddam's WMD were smuggled to Syria with the help of Russia. He also said Santorum is trying to declassify secret reports that show four storage sites for WMD in Iraq. Investigators confirmed WMD had been (or are currently) hidden there. But Rumsfeld ordered the weapons investigators out of the country. In the meantime, the White House has classified all reports about Iraqi WMD. Read About 150 News Reports Here

What the heck is going on in D.C.? Is the White House concerned about the truth coming out? Russia most certainly is not our friend. By hiding Iraq's WMD in Syria, Putin sought to cause President Bush great political harm. It is time to call a spade a spade. Americans need to wake up from sleeping in front of their television sets. Time to smell the coffee. The world is a very dangerous place.

Saddam stopped making the old gas shells before 1991 ( 1st Gulf War )...
Iraq had started implementing the binary type of shell you refer to by then..

During Desert Storm, millions of tons of "pesticide" were discovered, and a lot was simply dumped into the Euphrates river, before Allied troops got to it..
Most Nerve Gas Agents are simply pesticide.. ( Chemical 1 ) and a chemical "booster" ( chemical 2 ) which make up the ingredients in a binary shell..

Because pesticide has an agricultural use, the media and the left discounted it's existence as proof of WMD's..
The Bush gov let them get away with it..
God only knows why..

Every drop of that pesticide was Nerve Agent in my opinion..
Saddam sure as H**l wasn't using it to feed his people..

I thought, "If this story is true, why is the White House not talking about it?"

Well, we do know that keeping the lid on this story does NOT help the president politically, so the reason must be to protect national security. I find it refreshing that someone in D.C. is putting national security above his own political reputation, and I do not need to know the details if that information would somehow help our enemies.

I wonder how the naysayers can say that the "old" wmds are not dangerous simply because they're slightly older than weapons manufactured a few years later constituting a new wmd program. There is no info on the date of the manufacture of the discovered weapons. But we do know that degraded means not at one hundred percent potency. But since mustard gas degrades slowly, a slightly degraded canister can be very lethal ...as farmers in Europe are still finding out. More info is needed, but new or old, these are wmds made by Hussein.

"illiterate"

Excellent point. The dismissers of these findings fail to realize that many Americans, like a few of my lib friends, have been made to believe that Saddam had absolutely no wmds whatsoever. These findings destroy that argument. Now the naysayers are left with the "they're not dangerous" argument. How do they know they're not dangerous? Why don't they open up a mustard gas canister and show us? How about we correctly mix one of the sarin gas projectiles and explode it in room filled with the naysayers? I'm willing to bet that they'd scatter pretty quickly.

Post 20

Thanks for the links. The fact of the matter is that we have discovered many of Hussein's wmds that he was supposed to have turned over. Terrorists unwittingly or knowlingly tried to use them on our troops. And all we get from Big Media is a collective yawn. People who claim that the sarin gas projectiles found recently are harmless should be willing to undergo a simple experiment: we put them in a room, and explode one of those "harmless" properly mixed sarin gas projectiles in the room. I'm sure they'll agree to the experiment...especially Keith Olbermann (smirk).

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.