beardedbruce emits this tripe:

Another Ignored Discovery
The American Spectator ^ | 6/16/2004 | Steven Martinovich
Posted on 06/15/2004 9:55:18 PM PDT by elhombrelibre
With the media's focus on chronicling every attack on coalition forces or terrorist attack against Iraqi civilians in Iraq, they might be forgiven for missing other stories occasionally. Reporting democracy at the local level or the opening of a new school isn't sexy work for the most part. It's the equivalent of traveling halfway across the world to cover stories that local beat reporters write every day in your local paper. That focus on Iraqi insurgents, however, seems to have blinded almost everyone to a major story that surfaced last week since it was largely ignored by the media with the exception of the World Tribune and some smaller newspapers.
On June 9, Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.
What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam -- complete with U.N. inspection tags -- and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters -- the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.
"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."
Perricos isn't an American shill defending the Bush administration, but rather the acting executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and his report was made to the Security Council. Yet his report didn't seem to be of much interest to a media which has used the lack of significant discoveries to question the rationale for the war. After over a year of searching, experts have managed to find little in the way of the biological and chemical weapons that every major intelligence service -- including those of Germany and France -- maintained existed. We still haven't, but Perricos' report brings us one step closer....

Yeah, we all just suck up American Spectator/Freeperville effluvia like it was ambrisia from the gods....

Notice an actual lack of cites to original materials there? You know, something approaching an actual news (or other reliable source) statement reporting the alleged claims by Mr. Perricos? You know, maybe somthing like this????:

UNITED NATIONS — Demetrius Perricos, acting head of the United Nations weapons inspection program, can't disguise his satisfaction that almost a year after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. inspectors have found the same thing that their much-maligned U.N. counterparts did before the war: no banned weapons.

In his first interview since former chief U.S. inspector David Kay announced his conclusion that Iraq had no banned weapons before the war, Perricos said Kay's findings undercut complaints from the Bush administration that the U.N. teams were not aggressive enough to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.

Just to clue the brainless here, from beardedbruce's quote: "Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared."

May 2003?!?!? February 2004?!?!? No one claims that the U.S., during its invasion and occupation, didn't allow the looting of all kinds of stuff, some of which ended up on the black market, and some of which (explosives, etc) sadly enough ended up in the hands of insurgents and are now killing U.S. troops.

But surface-to-air missiles aren't WoMD. And the al Samoud missiles were arguably permissible, but Hussein agreed to destroy them (and Blix was watchng them be destroyed) just to keep the U.S. from getting all frisky for an unjustified and useless war. If Saddam didn't manage to destroy them all before the invasion, that's hardly his fault.

Cheers,