Bush Did Not Lie, Part 1

A Conversation with Kenneth Timmerman, investigative reporter

From an interview with Rush Limbaugh, February 2008

Rush: You report that weapons of mass destruction were indeed found in Iraq?
Timmerman: Yes.
Rush: The mantra is, “Bush lied” about weapons of mass destruction. Is it ever going to be reversed? First, tell me what was found, and where?
Timmerman: What was found was hundreds of tons of chemical weapons precursors. These were the weapons discovered by U.S. combat troops on the way up to Baghdad in March and April of 2003. On one occasion when an underground bunker full of chemical precursors was found, there was a CNN camera crew along with the soldiers, and they had to be scrubbed down in extremis before they got hit with these toxic chemicals. Of course, they never reported the truth and never cared afterwards. Biological weapons precursors, the strains to make biological weapons, were found. The plans to make nuclear weapons were found. The teams of scientists and technicians that had been assembled by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s were discovered.. They had never been disbanded. They were kept on the payroll all during the period of the United Nations sanctions when Saddam said he had no programs left. Well, he was still paying the scientists and the technicians who developed the programs and had the technology. As U.S. troops were marching toward Baghdad, the UN still had inspectors in Iraq that were dismantling, destroying long-range ballistic missiles that also had been built in violation of the UN sanctions. So you’re talking about missiles; you’re talking about chemical weapons precursors; you’re talking about biological weapons programs; and elements of the nuclear weapons program. All of these things had been found and were completely discounted by the press and by the Congress, even though they were told about it in open session by the U.S. arms inspectors who went in there after the liberation.
Rush: Then there’s an obvious question: why did the Administration go along with the notion there weren’t any?
Timmerman: I asked that question again and again of my sources in the White House, and I almost invariably got the same response. “We lost that one. Why go and fight a battle that we’ve already lost? We are going to look to the future and fight the future battles.”
Rush: You mean lost in the press?
Timmerman: You bet. “The media has beaten us. They have driven this notion of ‘Bush lied, people died’ into the mentality of ordinary Americans to the extent that nobody would believe us.” This is what they told me: “Nobody would believe us if we told them that we found chemical weapons, that we found even rockets packed with chemical munitions in Iraq, so why bother? We give up. Let’s go on to the next thing.” Unbelievable, isn’t it?
Rush: Yes, it so unbelievable you almost have to conclude there’s got to be something else guiding this that we might not ever know.
Timmerman: I studied Iraqi weapons plants all during the 1980s. I was there many, many times when Saddam was in power. I was the first Western reporter who ever interviewed his weapons designers and the heads of the weapons programs who were later exposed to the UN. I was able to help the first UN arms inspectors in 1991 and 1992, by identifying the locations of many of these weapons plants. I have the map of these plant s right here in my office. I’m sitting here looking at it now. The entire country when we went in, in 2003, was a vast weapons manufacturing facility. There were hundreds of these plants all over the country. Everybody knew about it. The UN knew about it, we knew about it, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and even the formerly mainstream media knew about it.