Melanie Phillips has uncovered a vast right and left wing conspiracy theory. A guy called Dave Gaubatz told her he found massive underground bunkers in mid 2003.
Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war. . . .
Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.
To sum up this ground breaking article, she claims that (via Gaubatz):
(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.
I guess we all owe George Bush, Dick Cheney and all the neocons an apology.
So what does the right wing punditry have to say about this vindication? Seems they are treading very carefully. Poor Melanie has gone so far out into the ether, that even her fellow travelers fear to go there, but that didn’t stop her from going a step further with her investigation.… You see, there are also those evil Chinese to worry about.
On her blog today, Phillips expounds on her article by printing a lengthy Memorandum which claims that:
(a) John Negroponte is persecuting various groups which are trying to bring the WMD conspiracy to light because
(b) Negroponte is part of what they call the “Red Team” in the U.S. government, which is exceedingly loyal to China, which is crucial given that
(c) the stolen-WMD-plot involved the subsequent transfer of “Saddam’s WMD technology to Syria and Iran” and that all happened
(d) “because the Chinese Army created an international consortium of rogue states to develop the Islamic Bomb” (and Negorponte, it implies, is concealing that by persecuting these groups because he is an agent of China).
For those interested in this hero in the making, here is what Dave Gaubatz has been up to:
The project to which Dave Gaubatz is currently devoting his time is called “Mapping Sharia in America”, the purpose of which is to create a comprehensive map of every mosque and Islamic school in the U.S.
He sounds like he’s Melanie’s long lost twin.