The media ignored the real WMD news

Jeff Jacoby nails it in today’s Boston Globe:

It found, in a grisly echo of Dr. Mengele’s sadistic experiments, “a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials . . . were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.” ISG inspectors interviewed one Iraqi scientist who had hidden in his home “a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B.” — a precursor for botulism toxin, the deadliest poison known. They spoke with a Iraqi chemical weapons official who said Saddam’s regime could have produced weaponized mustard gas within two months and Sarin, a lethal nerve agent, within 24 months. And they concluded that only the US invasion stopped Saddam from assembling missiles with ranges of up to 600 miles — far more than the 90-mile range Iraq was allowed.

So why did the ISG’s highly newsworthy findings get so much less press attention than David Kay’s announcement that he hadn’t found any WMD weapon stockpiles — something we already knew anyway? That’s a good question. Especially since the Kay report and the ISG report are in fact one and the same.*snip* But far more significant was what the Kay/ISG inspectors did find: massive evidence that an unrepentant Saddam was in willful defiance of Resolution 1441 right up to the end. That was the menace Bush repeatedly cited — the threat he said must be crushed before it grew imminent. Kay’s report proves he was right. You wouldn’t have known it from the headlines.o. There is an answer to the question of “why didn’t we hear more about this” – and I think most of you know what that answer is.