{"id":4060,"date":"2005-04-26T10:27:15","date_gmt":"2005-04-26T14:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4060.html"},"modified":"2005-04-26T10:27:15","modified_gmt":"2005-04-26T14:27:15","slug":"the-ultimate-final-word-on-wmd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-ultimate-final-word-on-wmd\/","title":{"rendered":"The ultimate final word on WMD"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Duelfer report explained last fall what reasonable people already knew: that Iraq didn’t have chemical or biological weapons before we launched an invasion, and that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions were little more than a madman’s fantasy. Today, however, we get the truly final word<\/a> from Duelfer and his team, debunking what’s left of the right’s desperate wishes.<\/p>\n

U.S. investigators hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have found no evidence that such material was moved to Syria for safekeeping before the war, according to a final report of the investigation released yesterday. […]<\/p>\n

U.S. officials have held out the possibility that Syria worked in tandem with Hussein’s government to hide weapons before the U.S.-led invasion. The survey group said it followed up on reports that a Syrian security officer had discussed collaboration with Iraq on weapons, but it was unable to complete that investigation. But Iraqi officials whom the group was able to interview “uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria,” the report said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far, no big surprise. The Duelfer report’s final version simply put the finishing touches on a wholesale debunking of the Bush administration’s entire reasoning for the war.<\/p>\n

Which is what made the Pentagon’s reaction<\/a> to the final report so breathtaking.<\/p>\n

Hussein “retained the intent and capability and he intended to resume full-scale WMD efforts once the U.N. sanctions were lifted,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said yesterday. “Duelfer provides plenty of rationale for why this country went to war in Iraq.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s politically-motivated denial and then there’s a complete divorce from reality. “Plenty of rationale”? Does Rumsfeld’s Pentagon even know what the Duelfer report is<\/a>?<\/p>\n

These guys really don’t care anymore. There’s no other explanation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Duelfer report explained last fall what reasonable people already knew: that Iraq didn’t have chemical or biological weapons before we launched an invasion, and that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions were little more than a madman’s fantasy. Today, however, we get the truly final word from Duelfer and his team, debunking what’s left of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}