August 14, 2008 - WND.com
© Jack Cashill

by Jack Cashill

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations.

Tony Pierce, Los Angeles Times, July 24

When the media refuse to look for something, whether that something be a high profile bimbo or a low yield nuclear bomb, the result will be the same: They won’t find it.

The saga of Saddam’s WMDs is chock-a-block with Rielle Hunters, people with extraordinary stories to tell if only someone would bother asking. A sampling:

Richard Butler

In the year 2000, Richard Butler wrote a book called The Greatest Threat.  The subtitle of the book spells out its stark thesis: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security.

Butler was not exactly a neo-con. A leftist and an internationalist, the Australian arms-control expert had overseen UNSCOM, the unlovely acronym for the United Nation Special Commission on disarming Iraq. 

After being booted from Iraq in late 1998, Butler considered Iraq's ongoing plea of innocence "the blackest lie." 

"It would be foolish in the extreme," he writes of Saddam, "not to assume that he is developing long-range missile capabilities, at work again on building nuclear weapons, and adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period."

The people who breakfast on the New York Times, snack on NPR, and dine on the CBS Evening News know as little about Richard Butler as they did about Rielle Hunter a week ago, which was nothing at all.

Spencer Abraham

In July 2004, the BBC reported on a press conference in which US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham claimed that the U.S. had removed 1.77 tons of enriched uranium from Iraq the month before.

Abraham called the removal a “major achievement.” Just as suddenly as the story appeared, however. it disappeared. Not a word was heard of it from the major American media.

Liberal bloggers, as expected, would labor to dismiss the importance of the find as they do all finds, but the mainstream media did not want to know about it at all.

The fear that the uranium find might have been as “major” as Abraham suggested kept them even from asking him why the story had been withdrawn.

Douglas Feith

In his exhaustively documented 2008 book, War and Decision, former undersecretary of defense Feith provides the single best account of the role WMDs played in the planning for war.

The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, could not trouble themselves to review it. The Post gave two reporters a one-day deadline to cherry pick excerpts from an unedited manuscript of Feith’s book and write something up. And that, the Post decided, was enough.

To keep its readers informed about WMDs, the Post did review Scott McClellan’s comically mistitled, “What Happened.” McClellan had not a clue as to what happened in Iraq. Feith did. Better to feature McClellan.

General Georges Sada

I was able to question the former Iraqi Air Force general when he visited the Kansas City area. I came away totally convinced of his character and his credibility.

In his 2006 book, Saddam's Secrets, Sada revealed that Saddam had many of Sada’s pilot colleagues ferry WMDs to Syria in the run-up to the war—a strategy that would have made perfect sense.

The major media had no time for Sada and even less time to follow the trail to Syria.

Don Bordenkircher

Bordenkircher served two years as national director of prison and jail operations in Iraq. In that capacity, he spoke to about 40 prisoners, who "boasted of being involved in the transport of WMD warheads to Syria."

WorldNetDaily found Bordenkircher’s revelations worth sharing. The mainstream media apparently have not.

Paul Gaubatz

Working with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Gaubatz began searching for WMD soon after Baghdad fell.

His sources confirm what Bordenkircher and Sada had been told: namely that Iraqis and Syrians, with Russian supervision, moved the bulk of the WMD to Syria.

With the help of Iraqi civilians, Gaubatz identified four WMD sites. The external signs of chemical activity were unmistakable: missile imprints, decontamination kits, atropine needles, and the like.

Says Gaubatz, “The Iraqis and my team had no doubt WMDs were hidden in these areas.” Extricating the materials from deeply fortified bunkers in an unsecured war zone would prove to be no easy matter.

The insecurity of the situation in Iraq may help explain why the Bush administration has not spoken out about these and other WMD revelations.

In his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former director of central intelligence George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, sheds some light on White House reticence.

“Sometimes,” he writes, “it is even useful to have positive accomplishments misperceived as failures, to throw foreign governments and rogue organizations off the scent.”

The major media seem to have played right into the White House’s hands. Having taken the political hit in 2004 and survived, the Bush administration likely used the media’s willful blindness to keep the bad guys in the dark about Iraq’s WMDs.

The administration’s openness about the recent removal of a 550 metric ton yellowcake cache suggests a change in strategy in a newly secure Iraq.

To be sure, the major media and the liberal bloggers have done their best to downplay the potency of the material and the political significance of its removal. After all, they tell us, everyone knew the yellowcake was there all along.

But the question has to be asked: if everyone knew it was there, why were the Democrats so eager to pull American troops and cede the yellowcake to whoever controlled the ground.

The fact that a Canadian uranium producer was willing to pay tens of millions of dollars for the yellowcake suggests its potential for future harm in the hands of al Qaeda or other terrorists.

The Democrats, however, did not want to know the potential of the yellowcake any more they did the paternity of Ms. Hunter’s baby. They don’t want the public to know either, and the media have obliged them.

For several years now, the Democrats have inflamed the passion of their governing coalition around the treasonous falsehood that “Bush lied.”

The truth about Iraq’s WMD program, they rightly fear, would only cool that passion before a more useful lie can take its place.

“Truth,” they say, “is the first casualty of war.” But historically, at least, a nation’s leaders have sacrificed the truth to help their side win.

Not this time.

Who is Jack Cashill?

Webmaster's note: Thanks to Cashill Newsletter reader, Hal Strunk, see below. . .

LETTER TO EDITOR: WMD found

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Arthur M. Borden's "Iraq war's valid origins" (Commentary, Monday) is correct except that he gets one very important fact incorrect. Mr. Borden, like many, incorrectly reports that the Duelfer report concludes that weapons of mass destruction were not found. This is false.

My own background is that of a former naval aviator and a "special" weapons expert. The Charles Duelfer report of 2004 (Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD) concluded that the WMD "program" ended in 1991, leading many to construe incorrectly that no weapons of mass destruction had been found.

Certainly the intelligence was wrong as to the existence of an "on-going WMD program," but WMDs made before 1991 have been found in Iraq, and some are still functional and viable. At the writing of the Duelfer report, limited amounts of sarin gas as well as mustard gas shells were discovered that were listed in Appendix J of the report.

The first sarin gas shell was found on March 17, 2004, when it had been mistakenly used as an IED (improvised explosive device) that partially contaminated two of our service members. Both mustard and sarin gas are chemical weapons and are defined by every weapons manual as weapons of mass destruction.

The latest count of sarin gas artillery shells found was more than 500 as of November 2006. This is significant because unlike mustard gas shells, sarin gas shells have an extensive shelf life.

Sarin gas is created by the artillery shell in flight by storing two separate chemical components and mixing them after the shell is launched by using a binary-chambered centrifugal warhead. Storing the two chemicals separately allows for the shell to remain viable much longer.

This is important because Saddam Hussein had been required to destroy his remaining WMD, and he obviously violated this requirement of the armistice agreement as well as many others. So the conventional wisdom that WMD were not found in Iraq is wrong.

The White House addressed this point by claiming that no "significant" WMD had been found, an attempt to minimize disclosure. The administration is in a difficult place because it must work to ensure the safety of the deployed troops and hope that we find the remaining stores of sarin gas instead of al Qaeda, which would gladly use these artillery shells against us. The use of the term "significant" is interesting, because by definition any WMD is significant.

SERGE WING

Alexandria

URL Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/16/wmd-found/