Unfair and unbalanced news:
Despite all evidence to the contrary, media conservatives continued to hype Santorum's "weapons of mass destruction"
Summary: Fox News' Brit Hume, John Gibson, and Jim Angle, as well as nationally syndicated radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Janet Parshall, continued to ignore conclusive assertions of intelligence officials that the degraded chemical munitions found in Iraq and hyped by Sen. Rick Santorum and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra were not, in fact, in the category of "weapons of mass destruction" that the U.S. was looking for at the time of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
In reporting and commenting on Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-PA) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra's (R-MI) June 21 claim that a recently declassified intelligence report found that there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq prior to the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Fox News' Brit Hume, John Gibson, and Jim Angle, as well as nationally syndicated radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Janet Parshall, continued to ignore conclusive assertions of intelligence officials that the degraded chemical munitions found were not, in fact, in the category of "weapons of mass destruction" that the U.S. was looking for at the time of the invasion. They also ignore the Iraq Survey Group's (ISG) September 2004 final report (also known as the Duelfer report), which noted that degraded chemical munitions had already been found in Iraq, and that they were not proof of an existing chemical weapons stockpile or of a renewed Iraqi chemical weapons program. Indeed, former ISG head Charles Duelfer stated that the munitions hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra do not qualify as weapons of mass destruction, though they may still pose a local threat.
Nevertheless, Hume reported that "[t]op administration officials said today that chemical and biological weapons have indeed been found in Iraq," and a report by Angle uncritically aired a statement by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that these munitions "are weapons of mass destruction." Further, Angle's report mischaracterized a statement by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, to suggest that she downplayed the danger of these munitions.
As Media Matters for America documented, nearly every June 21 Fox News program between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET touted Santorum and Hoekstra's disclosure. Santorum and Hoekstra's claims, however, had been quickly dismissed by Pentagon officials and the intelligence community. As CNN national security correspondent David Ensor reported on CNN's The Situation Room shortly after the announcement, "Charles Duelfer, the CIA's weapons inspector, tells us the weapons are all pre-Gulf War vintage shells, no longer effective weapons. Not evidence, he says, of an ongoing WMD program under Saddam Hussein." The Washington Post also reported June 22 that "[n]either the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."
The Duelfer report concluded that "old, abandoned chemical munitions" found in Iraq -- such as the ones hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra -- are not part of a "chemical weapons stockpile." According to the report [emphasis in original]:
While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad's desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.
The scale of the Iraqi conventional munitions stockpile, among other factors, precluded an examination of the entire stockpile; however, ISG inspected sites judged most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.
Duelfer also appeared on the June 22 broadcast of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, where he stated that these munitions are not weapons of mass destruction:
NEAL CONAN (host): The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report?
DEULFER: No, the report -- the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq war. They are almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard.
CONAN: Mm-hmm. So these -- were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said that it was going into Iraq to find before the war?
DEULFER: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions.
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