Rather's Got It Right

Although John Hawkins disagrees with him about the appropriate amount of coverage devoted to Ronald Reagan, Dan Rather had one thing right:

"There is other news, like the reality of Iraq," said the "CBS Evening News" anchor. "It got very short shrift this weekend."

Consider something to which Drudge currently links, from the World Tribune's "breaking" section:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

Apparently, both CBS and ABC so filled their space with Reagan news (and Rush's divorce as well as fire-safe cigarettes) that they didn't have room to mention this latest revelation.

ADDENDUM:
As a comment to this post, Joe Marier asks the significant question, "Who the heck is the World Tribune?" Simply put, I don't know. Drudge has linked to the site before, and I was able to independently confirm their information, as I can this time. This post was meant primarily as a jibe at Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, however. Had I thought this to be truly significant information, it would have merited a post of its own.

The reality is that this particular item is yet another of those indications — mounting, to be sure — that are only suggestive of WMD activity. The information to which the World Tribune refers is part of UNMOVIC's quarterly report (PDF), and the document admits that "no official information was made available to UNMOVIC on either the work or the results of the investigations carried out in Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group, led by the United States of America, nor did the Survey Group request any information from UNMOVIC." Still, the report attempts to align what information is available to the public with its own investigations. Some items of interest:

... following a visit of IAEA to a scrapyard in Rotterdam [in the Netherlands] to investigate increased radiation readings, it was discovered, through photographs taken at the time, that engines of [Iraqi] SA-2 surface-to-air missiles were among the scrap... They are the type of engines used in the Al Samoud 2 proscribed missile programme. ... Company staff confirmed that other items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys bearing the inscription "Iraq" or "Baghdad" had been observed in shipments delivered from the Middle East since November 2003. ...

In addition, the Commission is aware from comparative analysis of recent satellite imagery that a number of sites previously known to have contained equipment and materials subject to monitoring have been either cleaned out or destroyed... It is not known whether such equipment and materials were still present at the sites during the time of coalition action in March and April of 2003. However, it is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap.

The report goes on to describe Iraq's "procurement network that operated from 1999 to 2002, the period in which inspectors were absent" from the country. As has become frequently the case, much of the concrete information has to do with illegal missiles, rather than WMD, which primarily arise in the context of dual-use equipment. Regarding the images that the Tribune mentions, the document says, in an appendix:

While sites in Iraq were being monitored for updates through satellite imagery, it was detected that some sites subject to monitoring by UNMOVIC had been cleaned up and equipment and material had been removed from the sites... In other areas, whole buildings that had previously contained equipment and materials subject to monitoring had been completely dismantled.

And, indeed, a photograph from May 2003 shows about a dozen buildings that were completely gone by February 2004, leaving only marks on the ground where they had been. As I said, this is merely suggestive information, and various considerations mitigate or increase its implications. For example, depending on the building materials, moderately sophisticated looters could have taken the buildings down to sell as scrap, although that doesn't mean that the Ba'athists didn't use such activity as cover. On the other side of the balance, one must place the reality that UNMOVIC is an organization locked out of an investigation that continues work with which it had previously been charged, as well as the U.N.'s involvement in the Oil for Food scam.