Surfing for WMD: republicans force release of captured Iraq documents

[bigtree]

Surfing for WMD

The New York Times
MONDAY, APRIL 3, 2006
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/04/03/news/edweb.php

In a monumental departure from the Bush administration's addiction to secrecy, U.S. government intelligence agencies have begun posting on the Internet hundreds of thousands of Arabic-language documents captured in the invasion of Iraq. With the click of a mouse, fresh searches are being conducted by amateur sleuths intent on finding contrarian, grassy-knoll perspectives on the now generally accepted conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq.

Conservative publications were demanding public access to the 48,000 boxes of captured documents, as if weapons of mass destruction evidence would turn up in some of the long-winded, despot-worshiping examples of bureaucratese already on exhibit.

Republican lawmakers threatened to force the disclosure, so intelligence officials freed the material for the Web (fmso.leavenworth.army. mil/products-docex. htm), with an emphatic caution that the material contained no smoking guns, any more than Iraq contained weapons of mass destruction. In fact, intelligence officials have warned that the document dump is laced with hearsay, disinformation and forgery.

That has not stopped some early cries of eureka by bloggers on the right. But we applaud the demand for information they've been championing. The Bush administration too often dishonors that principle of openness and candor. The description by The New York Times's Scott Shane of an "army of amateurs" free to cherry-pick bits of loosely translated, murky information for biased purposes sounds no worse a prospect than the White House's track record in engineering the invasion.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/04/03/news/edweb.php

"army of amateurs"

- army of morans

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[Wickerman]

1. Will this include the redacted list of American Corps

that illegally traded with Saddam leading up to the war? Wasn't one of those that did so a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton?

[flashdebadge]

2. i've already had these documents thrown in my face

and told "You see? You see? There were WMD in Iraq!" I just shake my head. :crazy:

[bigtree]

5. I'm sure that the freeps who will be taken in by the discredited docs

will try to slip these into their rhetoric as fact. It should be interesting.

[underpants]

3. Freeper posts :"OMG!OMG! I FOUND IT!!!"

WE REALLY DID BUY A COMPLETE PILE OF BULLSHIT!!

[rpgamerd00d]

4. But according to neocons, WMDs were found (link)

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/17/acd.00.html

Oh, and this:

Neocon: "I Do think the WMDs were moved to Syria. I thought that before we invaded and I think that the recent revelations by a couple of Saddams generals to that effect are pretty strong indicators of same. The reason I thought Saddam had moved his WMDs beforer we actually invaded was simple: He didn't use them on our troops when we were building up prior to the invasion. It is my belief that he considered his options which were 1) Attack our forces with his WMDs or 2) Move them out of Iraq.

Option 1 would have resulted in Iraq becoming a glaze of radioactive glass. Saddam was aware of that and isn't crazy or stupid enough to believe it wouldn't happen.

Option 2 left him with a decision: Where to move the WMDs. Iran is a no go because Saddam and the Iranians fought a major war. Suadi Arabia and Jordan were no go because of their (relatively speaking) pro Western positions. That leaves Syria which is very similar to how Iraq was. A dictatorship with a definite anti Western stance.

Those are my beliefs based on all the evidence I've seen."

Notice the word "beliefs".
:rofl: