RichardHarlos.com

The image at left was provided by eyewitnesses on site in Iraq. Sources provided this image under conditions of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the find as their reasons for remaining unidentified.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan saw these images this past Wednesday and immediately took their story to the press.

(Ok, lest I be grossly misunderstood, the above commentary about the images is satire; a jok… I say, it’s a JOKE! The rest, sadly, is all true.)

“Congressman Hoekstra and I are here today to say that we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons. … Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”
-from Santorum: We found the WMD, ThinkProgress.org, 21 June 2006.

Perhaps if Santorum wasn’t just a tad behind (18 points) in his Senate re-election contest, we might forgive the timing of this over-hyped revelation, coming just one day before a debate and vote in the Senate on the subject of withdrawal from Iraq.

It might also have been nice if these allegedly intelligent and responsible representatives had consulted with intelligence officials to determine the precise significance of these alleged WMD’s. Had they done so, Santorum and Hoekstra would’ve learned:

Pentagon officials told NBC News that the munitions are the same kind of ordnance the U.S. military has been gathering in Iraq for the past several years, and “not the WMD we were looking for when we went in this time.” …

“We were able to determine that [the missile] is, in fact, degraded and … is consistent with what we would expect from finding a munition that was dated back to pre-Gulf War,” an intelligence official told NBC.
-from Officials: U.S. didn’t find WMDs, despite claims, MSNBC, 22 June 2006.

Let the citizens of America again be warned: your politicians conduct their affairs with their highest priority being their own popularity and re-election. Sort of taints the idea of a ‘representative’ form of government, doesn’t it?