Free Republic

We live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures. Saddam Hussein's secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate...

As I have often said (and resaid) the inexcusable element in the Democrats' attacks on their President in the midst of a war is that they are betraying a war they authorized in the first place. In the wake of Harry Reid's unhinged accusations the Republican National Committee has posted a collection of statements by Democratic Party leaders reminding us why we went to war. DEM OFFICIALS HAVE WARNED ABOUT WMDs IN IRAQ FOR YEARS Former President Bill Clinton: President Clinton: "We Have To Defend Our Future From These Predators Of The 21st Century. They Feed On The Free Flow...

Did you see it happen yesterday? Did you catch the news? It was probably buried as the fourth item, or maybe on page 17 of your local paper. The search is over. After two years and thousands of dead bodies, the search is over. What did we find? Nothing. Yesterday, the White House confirmed that the search for weapons of mass destruction was officially over, without finding as much as a used slingshot. You remember weapons of mass destruction, don’t you? It was what we were sold this loser war with. It was rammed down the throat of America, with...

The former deputy commander of U.S. Central Command says the U.S. had very credible intelligence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to last year's invasion by coalition forces. In both October 2002 and January 2003, Senator John Kerry stated his belief -- and backed it up with votes in favor of invading Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and represented a real threat to America's security. Now candidate Kerry and his supporters are criticizing President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, based on the premise that no WMDs have been found there. "We...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A workshop believed to be producing chemical munitions exploded in flames Monday moments after U.S. troops broke in to search it, killing two soldiers and wounding five. Jubilant Iraqis swarmed over the Americans' charred Humvees, waving looted machine guns, a bandolier and a helmet. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt did not say what sort of chemical agents were suspected of being supplied to insurgents from the Baghdad warehouse. After the blast, there was no sign of precautions against chemicals. "Chemical munitions could mean any number of things," including smoke grenades, he said. In Fallujah, U.S. troops came...

Dick Cheney, US vice-president, on Tuesday defended the US decision to invade Iraq but, in a notable shift of emphasis, he left open the question of whether Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction - a claim he made repeatedly before the war. In his first public response to David Kay, who resigned last Friday as the chief US arms inspector saying pre-war intelligence was wrong, Mr Cheney said: "There's still work to be done to ascertain exactly what's there, and I am not prepared to make a final judgment until they have completed their work." The vice-president had...

If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.