Wingnut bloggers claim Wikileaks docs prove Iraq had WMD’s

The predicable phalanx of right-wing bloggers exploded today with breathless claims that they have discovered proof of their long-held claim that Iraq did indeed have weapons of mass destruction just prior to the invasion by the US/British troops in 2001.

Trouble is, that claim is mostly bogus. Surprised? I didn’t think so. Wired breaks down the silliness with actual information of what is included in the leaked documents and what is not. However, that site strangely pushes the sensational aspect of the WMD angle.  Sadly, Andrew Sullivan also falls for the meme, hook, line and sinker. That’s all the rightosphere needed to gasp for air and yell we told ya so!

Nothing new has been revealed. Sure, there were scrapings of what used to be a WMD program but what was left was tiny and scattered – hardly what could be dubbed tools of ‘mass destruction’. We already knew this.

What the documents do prove is that no threat from these scraps was evident. More importantly, the residue of WMD’s in no way warranted the mass invasion of Iraq, a country whose leader was a sworn enemy of al Queda.

What strikes me as most odd about the wingnut WMD screams is that they are so fond of pointing out that the Wikileaks documents do not contain any new information, as is proven by the WMD disclosures. But now that it is convenient, the information contained in the documents regarding WMD’s is suddenly pertinent and revelatory to these same rightbloggers. Curious.

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. Most of those are intelligence reports or initial suspicions of WMD that don’t pan out. In July 2004, for example, U.S. forces come across a Baghdad building with gas masks, gas filters, and containers with “unknown contents” inside. Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins.

But 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. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

A small group — mostly of the political right — has long maintained that there was more evidence of a major and modern WMD program than the American people were lead to believe. A few Congressmen and Senators gravitated to the idea, but it was largely dismissed as conspiratorial hooey.

The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/#ixzz13KMfqh8h