Hoekstra and Santorum: WMD found

Via Josh Marshall, it looks like Republicans are still promoting the misperception that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq (PDF). Here's what Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum said yesterday according to the Washington Post:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

More than three years after the invasion, two prominent members of the United States Congress, including the chair of the House intelligence committee, are trying to pass off buried chemical shells from the 1980s as proof that Saddam had WMDs. Unbelievable.

Update 6/22 8:07 AM: Sadly, the reports on Hoekstra and Santorum from FoxNews.com ("Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq") and the Washington Times ("Chemical arms found in Iraq, report reveals") hype their claims and downplay the details. It's not hard to see how this could fuel further misperceptions among the public.

Update 6/22 3:24 PM: Drudge's headlines today are even more misleading out of context:

Report: 'Hundreds of WMDs Found in Iraq'...
Chemical weapons...

And some National Review writers at The Corner are arguing that the "discovery" is important. Sigh.

Update 6/24 5:36 PM: Media Matters documents Fox News and other conservatives continuing to hype the misleading WMD claims of Hoekstra and Santorum.

Comments

[David B.]

Good post Brendan. Just one thought though: Although the recently discovered weapons are not proof of an ongoing WMD program in the 1990s that the Bush administration claimed, they do show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions. I suppose we are going to get this spin from Bush-backers to downplay the first lie.

[Peteyboy]

Where this may not be a "We found the WMDs that would have been used if we didn't move on Hussein," they still violate the UN resolutions which also build the argument with the UN to go in. They should have been destroyed. Why weren't they if they're no good? And why weren't they found from the "exaustive" inspections by Blix and co. Hmmm. Something going on there.
This pile of weapons is kind of like a recently recovering drug addict who saves his "tools" for "just in case."
A poster on the blog I help with at My Spin Zone has some good points (and some Conservative leaning ones you mention).

[Peteyboy]

Oh, and if these are missed, what else was missed by inspectors? What about those flooded underground bunkers that military fella talked about to the non MSM press?

[Peteyboy]

Here's the link from the NYT on those WMD bunkers in Iraq discovered that the govt won't look at.

[Olive]

The puke funnel on this has extended even into the BattleStarGalactica board at SCIFI. Where if you point out any of the facts in this case, the conservative side of the debate begins to scream the usual and horrible things at you. Sigh.

The weapons they found were old and decayed ones from the Iran/Iraq War which were burried along the border between those two countries and then LOST. They were disclosed before congress by the ISG, and anyone can read the congressional testimony themselves.

Even the White House has stated that these are NOT the WMD or the associated program of which Bush spoke. The claims of WMD was based on a 2002 CIA report. Which after the ISG found in Iraq no evidence to report, the CIA retracted at lenght before Congress in 2004. And admitted at that point that they had no direct intelligence on Iraq after 1998. That's right, 1998. Their entire report was all rumor and conjecture, and the lies of an informant known as CURVEBALL they never directly interviewed.

How long will this spin continue?? How long will these Republicans keep trying to turn straw into gold?? Even the WHITE HOUSE won't back them up on this fairytale. Sigh.