The other day the Powerline guys noted that NBC News managed to bury a legitimate scoop “beneath a grotesquely misleading headline.” They wrote:
Today’s Washington Post adds new information to the NBC News piece but not until paragraphs five and six. We learn that Sabri told the CIA that Saddam was lying, that biological weapons research was underway, and that Saddam had dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes.
To recap, on March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a broad range of concerns regarding Saddam’s weapons programs, his connections to terrorist organizations (see here for latest revelations), his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions. American intelligence (which had evidently factored in Sabri’s claims into its analysis) and other foreign governments concluded at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. On top of this were the findings contained in detailed U.N. reports. For example, on March 6, 2003, the United Nations issued a report on Iraq’s “Unresolved Disarmament Issues.” It stated that the “long list” of “unaccounted for” WMD-related material catalogued in December of 1998–the month inspections ended in Iraq–and beyond were still “unaccounted for.” The list included: up to 3.9 tons of VX nerve agent (though inspectors believed Iraq had enough VX precursors to produce 200 tons of the agent and suspected that VX had been “weaponized”); 6,526 aerial chemical bombs; 550 mustard gas shells; 2,062 tons of Mustard precursors; 15,000 chemical munitions; 8,445 liters of anthrax; growth media that could have produced “3,000 – 11,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 6,000 – 16,000 litres of anthrax, up to 5,600 litres of Clostridium perfringens, and a significant quantity of an unknown bacterial agent.” Moreover, Iraq was obligated to account for this material by providing “verifiable evidence” that it had, in fact, destroyed its proscribed materials (see more on Hans Blix and the “verifiable evidence” standard here). The same report noted “a surge of activity in the missile technology field in the past four years” and that while 817 of the 819 Scud missiles Iraq had imported had been accounted for, inspectors did not know the number of missiles Iraq had indigenously produced or still possessed. Similarly, while inspectors had accounted for 73 of Iraq’s 75 declared “special” warheads, doubts remained that Iraqi officials were truthful about how many had actually been manufactured. It acknowledged that inspectors had found a handful of 122mm chemical rocket warheads but noted that this discovery may only be the “tip of the iceberg” since several thousand, in the inspectors’ judgment, were still unaccounted for. It also stated that no underground chemical facilities had been found but added that such facilities may exist given the size of Iraq and that future inspections in this area would have to rely on “specific intelligence.” Finally, the report declared that there appears to be no “choke points” to prevent Iraq from producing anthrax at the same level it did before 1991, that large-scale Iraqi production of botulinum toxin “could be rapidly commenced,” and that given Iraq’s history of concealment, “it cannot be excluded that it has retained some capability with regard to VX.”
