Found: WMD
Published January 03, 2004
Flash! We finally discovered those WMD! The cache included:
...100 explosives, including 60 fully functional pipe bombs, as well as briefcase bombs, land mine components, detonation cord, trip wire, and binary explosives; machine guns and other illegal weapons; some 500,000 rounds of ammunition; a stockpile of chemical agents, including a large quantity of sodium cyanide and acids such as hydrochloric, nitric and acetic acids...
Oh, wait.
Forget it.
That stuff wasn't discovered in Iraq. It was discovered in Tyler, Texas, and it was possessed by right-wing extremists.
Bo-ring!
How much of a threat could chemical weapons be to U.S. residents if these weapons are being held by terrorists within the borders of the U.S.? Clearly, balsa-wood toy gliders in Iraq pose a much greater threat to you and me.
Please, can't we have another story about how we discovered WMD in Iraq, followed by the inevitable retraction? Those are ever so much fun, and the case for the invasion of Iraq, which has killed over 400 Americans and maimed 11,000, gets stronger and stronger with each phantom WMD discovery.
Anyway, the story we're not hearing all that much about is that cyanide-bomb plot, which involves real, actual terrorists and real, actual cyanide that could have killed real, actual American people.
Of course, the problem is that these terrorists aren't the kind that the casting agents at the Bush Administration and the media companies are looking for these days. Wrong type.
For one thing, they worship Jesus Christ, not a "demon-obsessed pedophile", as the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention described Mohammed.
And the President is a card-carrying member of the Jesus fan club, and so is Attorney General John "No King But Jesus" Ashcroft, so it may be difficult for them to draw attention to misguided Christian soldiers. And the press is similarly uneasy about the whole non-brown/non-Muslim threat.
David Neiwert, who won a National Press Club Award for his reporting on domestic terrorism, wishes the threat at home would get a little more attention:
...Frederick Clarkson reported in Salon last month that the DoJ took unusual steps to keep the trial of domestic terrorist Clayton Waagner — who'd tried to "piggyback" himself on the anthrax terrorist by mailing death-threat letters stuffed with white powder to abortion clinics — a low-profile case. Likewise, there have been multiple other cases of domestic terrorism in the past year that have failed to receive significant attention.The fact that a pathology in the press is a primary factor here should not be understated. I've struggled hard and long against the problem of the mainstream media's blinders when it comes to the significance of the extremist right and its activities [and the fact that I now work independently suggests my solution to date]. As Chip Berlet points out in the Clarkson piece:
- Found: WMD
- Published: January 03, 2004
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- Section: Politics
- Filed Under: Culture: Media
- Writer: Brian Flemming
- Brian Flemming's BC Writer page
- Brian Flemming's personal site
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Ignoring The WMD Find
May 19, 2004
Even though the war in Iraq is not about WMDs, you would have thought that the discovery of an actual weapon of mass destruction in Iraq would be big news, especially since it was aimed at American soldiers. But apparently not in the eyes of most U.S. newspaper editors and network television producers, who chose largely to ignore one of the major stories coming out of Iraq this week.
On Monday, the Iraqi Survey Group, which is tasked with searching for Saddam Hussein's WMD, confirmed that an artillery round containing weaponized sarin nerve gas was detonated in an improvised explosive device (IED) aimed at U.S. troops in Baghdad on Saturday (May 15). Thankfully, the IED didn't kill anyone, and the sarin components dispersed without causing real harm because the 155-mm shell had not been used as an artillery round, as it was intended. The weapon's design required the shell to be fired from a launcher that would have allowed the binary components of the sarin to mix as the shell spun at high speed, which would have turned the relatively small artillery round into a devastating killer. Instead, the device detonated in an IED, and most of the 3-4 liters of sarin were not activated.
So how did the major dailies treat this story? They buried it. The Washington Post carried a story on page 14, with a subtitle that dismissed its significance, "Weapon Probably Not Part of a Stockpile, Experts Say." But despite the headline, the story said nothing of the sort. The Post reported that David Kay, the man previously in charge of the Pentagon's search for WMD, "said the discovery did not conclusively prove the existence of stockpiles of concealed chemical and biological weapons," which is very different than saying somehow it proved the contrary. The story goes on to quote Raymond Zilinskas, a former U.N. weapons inspector: "The question is: Was it part of a cache that contains another 10 or 20 of these, or is it one of a kind? ... We have no way of knowing at this point."
The New York Times headline on page 11 was also dismissive. "Army Discovers Old Iraqi Shell Holding Sarin, Illicit Weapon." Most of the story was a re-hash of the complaints that the Bush administration had failed to find the WMD the president and his advisers had said Hussein possessed. The Times only grudgingly admitted that the existence of the shell offers "some of the most substantial evidence to date that Mr. Hussein did not destroy all of the banned chemical agent, as he claimed before the war last year."
One shell does not a stockpile make -- but where there is one such weapon there are likely to be others, dozens, maybe hundreds. No matter how you slice it, this story is important. But most of the liberal media have been too busy focusing on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or other bad news from Iraq to pay attention.
On the same day the Times put the WMD story on page 11, it ran a front-page piece breathlessly reporting that "M.P.s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees." Since "strip-searches" are a routine fact of life in most U.S. jails and prisons, and these detainees are arguably more dangerous than common criminals, this "revelation" seems a little overblown. Furthermore, nothing in the story suggests that there were any orders to force the prisoners to engage in sexually degrading behavior or to encourage soldiers take pictures of naked prisoners, much less to jump on them, punch them or have others abuse them.
No matter how hard the media try to turn a prison scandal involving a handful of rogue soldiers into an official policy of abuse, they haven't yet been able to produce a smoking gun. Yes, the soldiers involved should be punished, but that appears likely. Four soldiers will face military courts this week, with one having already pled guilty. The only foot-dragging by the military so far involves the three female soldiers who are implicated in the scandal but who have yet to be charged. Oddly, the media aren't screaming foul on this apparent double standard.
Mark my words, these proceedings will dominate the news in the days ahead, even if we stumble across more of Hussein's WMD in Iraq.