The news media has been predictably silent about a surprise found in the thousands of top-secret documents leaked by the shadowy WikiLeaks organization.
It turns out that Iraq was overrun with weapons of mass destruction. They’re still turning up. If you remember, the media had a field day with the Bush administration’s failure to come up with Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of atomic, biological or, chemical (ABC) weapons.
Intelligence reports of such weapons of mass destruction were among the top justifications that George W. Bush gave for invading Iraq and overthrowing Hussein.
"By late 2003," writes journalist Noah Shachtman, " even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq.
"But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs and to encounter insurgent specialists in toxins.
"Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict – and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."
In August 2004, reportShachtman, "American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic ‘blister agent’ used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and "reported two positive results for blister." The chemical was then "triple-sealed and transported to a secure site" outside their base.
Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a "chemical weapons" complex. "One of the bunkers has been tampered with," they write. "The integrity of the seal appears intact, but it seems someone is interested in trying to get into the bunkers."
Meanwhile, the second battle of Fallujah was raging in Anbar province. In the southeastern corner of the city, American forces came across a "house with a chemical lab. Substances found are similar to ones in lesser quantities located at a previous chemical lab.
Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMDs in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells "that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint," reports Schachtman "The 155mm rounds were filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which were leaking a black tar-like substance."
In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD.
Even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents.
"These rounds were most likely left over from the Saddam-era regime," writes Shachtman. "The rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time."
A January 2006 log notes "neuroparalytic" chemical weapons.
Why hasn’t this been reported in the mainstream media? Why is the New York Times silent? How can the CBS Evening News or National Public Radio ignore such a story?
Easy! Such reporting is not within their liberal agenda. It would prove George W. Bush was right.
The mainstream press hasn’t hesitated to proclaim anything in the WikiLeaks documents that embarrass Bush or the Pentagon.
So much for unbiased reporting.