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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub

• US-led coalition forces in Iraq have found some 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, Republican lawmakers said, citing an intelligence report.
  
  "Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," said an overview of the report unveiled by Senator Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra, head of the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives.
  
  "Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," it says.
  
  The lawmakers cited the report as validation of the US rationale for the war, and stressed the ongoing danger they pose.
  
  "This is an incredibly -- in my mind -- significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," Santorum said.
  

An update on these so-called "WMD":

• FOOL'S GOLD. Folks may remember the newly declassified discoveries of WMDs being touted by Rick Santorum, Curt Weldon, and others. The haul amounts to about 500 munitions which include sarin and mustard gas components and they are very, very scary. At least if you're a common household insect. That, at least, is the opinion of folks who actually know what they're talking about. Salon's Michael Scherer went by the congressional hearings meant to ascertain the potency of these armaments. The testimony, if it weren’t disproving the lies that led us into war, would've been funny. David Kay, the nation's top weapons inspector, explained that:
  
  As far back as September 2004, the CIA had disclosed the discovery of the old chemical munitions from Iraq's war with Iran. The CIA also explained that these weapons were not the ones the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. What's more, Kay said, the decades-old sarin nerve gas was probably no more dangerous than household pesticides -- and far more likely to degrade at room temperature. "In terms of toxicity, sir," Kay told Weldon at one point, "I suspect in your house, and I know in my house, I have things that are more toxic than sarin produced from 1984 to 1988."
  
  True to form, Weldon yelled at him. And the hearings got no better from there. Two Defense Intelligence Agency experts came to testify, explaining that the munitions were too corroded to be of use, and their embedded chemical weaponry was probably inextricable. The Committee's Republicans, somewhat pathetically, were reduced to protesting that these weapons do, indeed, fit the "category" of chemical weapons, even if they were no longer useable. Watching all this, Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat, mocked his colleagues by comparing them to prospectors who come across a shiny nugget of fool's gold. "Well, old-timer," Skelton said, "that's a piece of pyrite." He then read aloud "a list of the vast quantities of chemical weapons that the CIA, and the Bush administration, had expected to find in Iraq. This laundry list, as described in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, included between 100 and 500 metric tons of chemical weapons agents, most of which had been allegedly produced after 1991. As Skelton put it, 'The goalposts seem to have been moved.'"

Do you feel safer knowing that Santorum and Weldon are writing this nation's laws?