Note from Jamal Ware, spokesman to House intel committee chairman Peter Hoekstra: "U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, will hold a press conference to release the unclassified summary of an Army report on chemical weapons found in Iraq since May 2004. The press conference is scheduled for 5:15 p.m., today, in the Senate Radio-TV Gallery, S-325."

Update: Here's what they said. And here's what they didn't:

...The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

In other words, the leftovers from back in the 80s in the era that saw even Rumsfeld personally meeting with Saddam to offer Iraq some intelligence assistance in its war with Iran. It's hard not to believe that Santorum and Hoekstra were put up to this as surrogates of the White House, which gets all of the desired effect on the eastern side of the buzz machine, without too many fingerprints.

Update II: And don't forget, by the way, who has a big role in the Army National Ground Intelligence Center, down in Charlottesville, Virginia. That would be MZM, until recently chaired by one imprisoned-for-bribery Mitchell J. Wade. And as Walter Pincus reported, MZM systematically hired relatives of top NGIC officials, and then the NGIC officials themselves, as they started to seek and win ever larger contracts to provide database intel services to the Army center.

Posted by Laura at June 21, 2006 05:07 PM