Lynn C. Woolsey: “stop the presses; we found Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Or at least that is what some Members of Congress would…”

“stop the presses; we found Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Or at least that is what some Members of Congress would have the American public believe. They stake this claim on an unclassified portion of an intelligence report that addressed the finding of 500 weapons shells of old, inert chemical agents from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The shells had been buried deep within the ground near the Iranian border and forgotten by Iraqi soldiers. Yesterday, intelligence officials made clear that these deactivated shells were not the so-called weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration used as the basis for going to war in Iraq. Mr. Speaker, a few weapons shells from a two-decade-old war does not a weapons of mass destruction program make. No matter how you slice it, no matter how you package the story, Saddam Hussein simply didn't have a weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq; yet, there are those who would stop at nothing to prove they existed. It is as if finding the weapons of mass destruction would somehow validate an unjust and unnecessary war that has been mismanaged from the day it was first shamefully conceived. Mr. Speaker, do a few weapons shells from a two-decade-old war justify the 2,511 American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq? Do they justify the more than 18,000 soldiers who have been wounded forever?…”