Orange County Weekly: He’s Got Gas!

Feb. 25 - Mar. 3, 2005

He’s Got Gas!

Congressman Chris Cox says our troops have found sarin and ricin in Iraq. His high-level source: Fox News

by STEVE LOWERY

(snip)

Got it? Let’s review: Cox is a Republican congressman from Newport Beach, and one of the most powerful men in the country by virtue of his chairman’s seat on the House Committee on Homeland Security. At a Feb. 17 banquet for the Conservative Political Action Conference, Cox said, “America’s Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd. . . . We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq.”

This was news to us—and to reporter Michelle Goldberg. Writing Feb. 19 on Salon.com, Goldberg noted, “Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.”

(snip)

Cox included a more complete passage from the Feb. 17 speech. It reads:

“Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Left persists with the fiction that our efforts in Iraq are a distraction from the war on terrorism. No, this is the war on terrorism. We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq, and even more about their intended use. A plan to disperse sarin and the lethal poison ricin in the United States and Europe was actively being pursued as late as March 2003. The facility in which the weapons were being made also housed a large inventory of perfume atomizers of various shapes and sizes to mimic the existing brands on the store shelves in the United States. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand the implications, but it does take imagination and determination to combat it, which is why it is so important we have an administration that gets it.”

Now, remember, the administration that “gets it” is also the administration that last month said it wasn’t looking for this stuff anymore because there’s nothing to find.


(snip)

“What I said came straight from news reports the preceding weekend. That is why, as Goldberg wrote, ‘most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries’ and did not gasp when I said it.”

In fact, when I did a search for “news reports” on the subject of ricin and sarin and Iraq between Feb. 1 and Feb. 21, I found just two: one on FoxNews.com and the other in the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

(snip)


Even more succinctly, the same ISG report says flatly, “ISG has no evidence that IIS Directorate of Criminology (M16) scientists were producing CW or BW agents in these laboratories.”

(snip)

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/05/25/features-lowery.php

also whoopie cushions, and paper bags soaked in lighter fluid containing dog doo doo...