Dumb and Dumber

Desperate politicians will often do or say incredibly stupid things. At the time they commit such acts, they usually think they are doing very smart things. And so it must have been in the minds of Rick Santorum (R-Pa) and Peter Hoekstra (R-Mi) when they chose, apropos of nothing other than their own political livelihoods, to utter those now infamous words,

We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons.

They might have easily added the qualifying phrase, "and they are us." Because what Hoekstra and Santorum actually "found" were documents that described chemical weapons that had, in fact, been found and recorded by US forces in 2003. The chemical weapons were then assertained to be left-overs and of a pre-1991 vintage. The DoD immediately disavowed the claims by Santorum and Hoekstra, who, at that point, appeared desperate to flail anything that might save themselves and the flagging perceptions of the Iraq debacle now assumed by most of the American public. They should have reconsidered this grandstanding about nothing. Because further exposure of the provenance of these weapons would prove to be unsettling for the Bush administration.

And so it is. U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent Dave DeBatto has recently published his account of finding some of these chemical weapons, weapons immediately identified then as dating from the late 1980's, specifically 1987-1988. How was this so quickly learned. As the joke goes, they had the receipts:

I walked over to one of the crates and saw a plastic sheath containing what appeared to be a bill of laden. I cut it open with my Leatherman and pulled the documents out.

[...]

I opened the folded off-white paper form and noticed several interesting things right away. The bombs had been purchased in the United States in 1988 from what appeared to be a government contractor called The Carlyle Group.

At this point I can expect most readers are familiar with the Carlyle Group; who the prominent members are and have been. And while I don't find the revelation all that surprising (more surprising is that they would actually have their name on a shipping bill for chemical weapons going to Iraq!), it is obvious that the White House would not want much fuss made over the discovery of these weapons, seeing as how Daddy Bush is on the board of the Carlyle Group these days.

In fact, the Carlyle Group is one of those apolitical organisations whose raisons d'etre are money, power and influence. People from across the spectrum have worked or now work for the consortium: Colin Powell, George Soros, James Baker, Caspar Weinberger, and few European magnates including, but not limited to, Karl Otto Poehl, former Bundesbank president and Henri Martre, former president of Aerospatiale. The French presence here is interesting considering that DeBatto also found evidence that those Iraqi chemical weapons routed their way through France at some point. Ahh, mon dieux, c'est la vie....

Santorum and Hoekstra are clearly a couple of dundering idiots and now, after having reintroduced to the American public the US governments' own sale of WMD to Saddam Hussein, we know just how much that is true. Unfortunately for tweedle-dum (R-PA) and tweedle-dee (R-MI), so does the Carlyle Group.

[Debatto story via Covert History]