The other day the Powerline guys noted that NBC News managed to bury a legitimate scoop "beneath a grotesquely misleading headline." They wrote:
March 22, 2006
It Helps to Read Past the Headline...
...of this report by NBC on the CIA's secret source within Saddam's inner circle: Foreign Minister Naji Sabri. The headline and subhead read: "Iraqi diplomat gave U.S. prewar WMD details. Saddam's foreign minister told CIA the truth, so why didn't agency listen?
You have to read deep into the story to learn that Sabri told the CIA that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons:
Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had "poison gas" left over from the first Gulf War. Both Sabri and the agency were wrong.
So NBC had a legitimate scoop, and they buried it in a single sentence beneath a grotesquely misleading headline.
Obviously, if Saddam's Foreign Minister admitted that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and leftover poison gas, that would have been seen as the final confirmation of what everyone in the intelligence community already believed. And Sabri's statement that Saddam "desperately wanted a [nuclear bomb]" but would need more than a few months to a year to build one--bizarrely presented as exculpatory by NBC--would hardly have been reassuring.
It's worth noting, too, that NBC's story is based on leaks by anonymous intelligence officials, who, consistent with their usual practice, no doubt spun the story in as anti-Bush a direction as they could. We don't know exactly what Sabri told the CIA.
By rights, this should be the last nail in the coffin of the "Bush lied!" left. But of course it won't be; the "Bush lied!" theory has been deader than a doornail for a long time, but that hasn't prevented it from being retailed by the left.
Today's Washington Post adds new information to the NBC News piece but not until paragraphs five and six. We learn that Sabri told the CIA that Saddam was lying, that biological weapons research was underway, and that Saddam had dispersed chemical weapons to loyal tribes.
Publicly Sabri was insisting that Iraq had no prohibited weapons of mass destruction. Privately, the sources said, he provided information that the Iraqi dictator had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway.
When it came to chemical weapons, Sabri told his handler that some existed but they were not under military control, a former intelligence official familiar with the situation said. Another former official added: "He said he had been told Hussein had them dispersed among some of the loyal tribes."
To recap, on March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a broad range of concerns regarding Saddam's weapons programs, his connections to terrorist organizations (see here for latest revelations), his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions.
