chiefs-special-guy said:
It is a front page story in the NYT today.
It appears that these are 15-20 year old degraded sarin weapons. The administration is NOT saying this is the WMD they were after.
God Bless
Hi, chief. I read the article I think you're referring to ...
(Is this it?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/23/us/23believers.html)
I think that whether or not these were the specific caches of weapons the US thought it knew about is irrelevant. As even the article points out, we couldn't check everything, everywhere.
It's easy to be led astray by the article, which is tendentious as one would expect from the mainstream media and especially the NYT, specifically written to direction away from the true issues and conclusions, and toward the suggestions that the goverment was wrong and that the folks who are still pushing the issue are just a bunch of nutty, UFO-searcher types. If one sticks to the narrow issues, though, they become mighty clear, and so do the conclusions that the now-absolute facts prove.
Here are the material facts provided by the recently declassified document and even the NYT article, at least as I see it:
(1) WMDs have been found - not just recently but since the start of the war,
(2) the WMDs that have been found in Iraq since the start of the war were in a degraded condition when found,
(3) the types of WMDs that have been found degrade as a result of the passage of time.
Here are the inescapable conclusions one must draw from these facts:
(1) Saddam had the newly reported WMDs before the war, and
(2) Saddam did not, as he had said, destroy all his WMDs before the war.
Aside from those two points, the rest is manipulative fluff.
Best ... and God bless you too, my friend!
Jon