Attaboy

Eli Lake’s fascinating New York Sun series on Iraq’s WMD continued yesterday. In this most recent segment, Lake discusses the claims of David Gaubatz, a former Air Force intelligence officer who claims to have told inspectors of potential WMD sites, but was ignored.

Gaubatz states that he learned, through local sources in Iraq, of the existence of potential WMD stockpiles “in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr” where the materials were stashed in tunnels with thick walls and secured under canals. According to Gaubatz sources, the canals in the area would be drained, the tunnels constructed, and then the water allowed to come back over the concrete walls to hide them.

Gaubatz claims to have provided detailed information on the locations to the Iraqi Special Group, the inspection team responsible for seeking out the weapon caches. But he claims his information wasn’t checked carefully:

Mr. Gaubatz’s new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group’s search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration’s main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer.

More importantly, Gaubatz’s claims will likely be of interest to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, leading an House intelligence committee’s investigation into what actually happened to Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons:

Like many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to be concealing between 1991 and 2003.

If you need any evidence of the complicity of the Democrats in Congress and the American media to give this issue short shrift, here it is. Since both have loudly claimed for three years that President Bush’s “reasons” for going into Iraq were “lies,” you can understand why they’d be ignoring Rep. Hoekstra’s quest to discover what really happened. Many people in this country believe that Saddam had those weapons, and not finding out where they are or what happened to them could be far more costly than just a bunch of reporters and politicians looking stupid. The baffling thing about this entire issue is how the Bush administration, all the way up to the President himself, seems so willing to claim they were wrong on the WMD assessment. I’m certain there are many people out there who, if sitting in his position, would have fought tooth and nail to find out what really happened to that material in the months leading up to the war.

Mr. Lake’s series continues to provide pieces of the story many of us have longed to see published. My hope is that Rep. Hoekstra’s work bears fruit, and that Mr. Lake will be able to continue shining the light on this critical story.