Saturday, April 21, 2007

Welcome to a world where the sky is the color of sarin gas

Glenn Greenwald has a post noting some conspiracy theory cooked up by a man named Dave Gaubatz, which has been trumpeted by right-wing blogs (and even politicians like Curt Weldon and Peter "mustard gas from 1991 proves that Saddam had WMDs in 2003" Hoekstra). Gaubatz's theory? As Mr. Greenwald puts it,
(a) WMDs really were found in Iraq after the invasion, (b) they were located in vast underground bunkers (c) which contained "nuclear, chemical and biological materials", but (d) the U.S., through negligence, failed to secure those sites and, as a result, (e) the WMDs were stolen by The Terrorists and/or Syrian agents, who now have them and are actively plotting (along with China, Russia and North Korea) to use them against the West, but --

(f) because the Bush administration is so embarrassed by their failure to prevent the theft of all these dastardly weapons, and because Democrats are embarrassed by this discovery because it proves that Saddam really did have WMDs all along, they have all jointly created a vast conspiracy where they conceal the discovery of WMDs in order to cover up for their negligence.

Gautz's evidence? From the NY Times article:
Stationed near Nasiriya, he and a colleague headed out in a utility vehicle at 6 a.m. and spent their days talking with anyone they saw — Bedouin tribesmen, farmers, hospital workers, former military officers, police officers and city bureaucrats.

Eventually, by his account, Iraqis led him to four places where they said they thought that chemical weapons were hidden in underground bunkers or, in one case, under the Euphrates River.

And of course, everyone is in on the conspiracy to cover this up:
To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously gone missing.

Although actually, given the administration's track record with "mysteriously losing" potentially embarrassing documents....

[Edit] Swell. In addition to being a conspiracy theorist, he's also a white supremacist.

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