Well, sort of. Okay, not really.
In case you had any doubts that Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra are idiots, I give you this:
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.
"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.
The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.
Saddam was known to have developed and used chemical weapons; we sold him the components for some of it, and his gas attacks against Kurdish villages are a component in his ongoing trial. Iraqi troops used poison gas during the Iraq-Iran war. We have previously found old artillery shells modified for chemical warfare.
What we have never found -- and still haven't -- is any indication that he had functioning stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, or a functioning nuclear program. 15-year-old artillery shells do not constitute a reason to invade.
Even the Pentagon rejects the senators' contention:
Asked why the Bush administration, if it had known about the information since April or earlier, didn't advertise it, Hoekstra conjectured that the president has been forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq.
Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.
"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."
Idiots.
Hoekstra, Santorum, Iraq, WMD, politics, midtopia
2 comments:
Santorum's approval rating is 38 percent. He's trailing his challenger, Bob Casey, by 18 points.
I sincerely hope that after this performance the gap widens. I expect a certain number of mouthbreathers in the House; the Senate is supposed to be where the adults play.
This is the far right's answer to the far left's "Rove's getting impeached!" activists.
These people will keep claiming the WMD were found until they're blue in the face, because people will decide they cannot know for sure. By placing the seed of doubt in the statement that there aren't any, people think "we can't ever really know what happened" and give the administration the benefit of the doubt.
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