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Check out Paul Kiel and the Philly Inquirer on Cong. Weldon's plan to hunt for WMD in Iraq. With Able Danger, his dalliance with Ghorbanifar's aide "Ali," his flirtation with Milosevic-era businessman Bogoljub Karic and insistence he could end that war on his own, his past praise of Uzbekistan's Karimov, Weldon has demonstrated quite a knack for personal foreign policy crusades.
Update: The Inky piece is worth reading in full. Here's an excerpt:
[Dave] Gaubatz, who lives in Dallas, is a former Air Force special investigator who served as a civilian employee in Iraq for a number of months in 2003.
While in Iraq, he acquired what he considered reliable information on the existence of WMD caches in four locations - not old stuff dating from the pre-Gulf War days, but recently produced gas and chemical weapons.
Gaubatz said he first contacted Weldon and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R., Mich.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, to share his info and get them to prod the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to do the WMD searches in the locales.
Instead, Gaubatz said, Weldon latched onto the idea as a "personal political venture" and discussed a Hoekstra-Weldon trip to Iraq, under the guise of visiting the troops, that would detour to Nasiriyah.
Once there, Gaubatz said, the congressmen planned to persuade the U.S. military commander to lend them the equipment and men to go digging by the Euphrates for the cache Gaubatz believed to be there.
He said that Weldon made it clear he didn't want word leaked to the Pentagon, to intelligence officials, or to Democratic congressmen.
As Gaubatz told me: "They even worked out how it would go. If there was nothing there, nothing would be said. If the site had been [scavenged], nothing would be said. But, if it was still there, they would bring the press corps out."
Gaubatz said the tenor of comments made at a May 4 meeting upset him.
"It was treated as an election issue that would get votes," he said. "I've never been involved in politics, so it was a very big eye-opener to me."
Plus, Gaubatz had safety concerns.
"To me, it was a big safety issue for them [Weldon and Hoekstra] to be going to an isolated area of Iraq. They are a target, and the people going out with them would be a target."
After the meeting, he said, he called a reporter at the Washington Times and alerted her of the plan. In turn, he said, she called Weldon's office to get confirmation. That inquiry, Gaubatz said, scuttled the project.
I found Gaubatz to be sincere and credible. You can check out some of the details at www.davegaubatz.com.
Update: Just had a really interesting interview with Dave Gaubatz. According to him, Weldon and his chief of staff Russ Caso are now apparently running a slime campaign against him all over town.
According to Gaubatz, Weldon told him that their planned Memorial Day trip to dig for WMD in Iraq would have to be kept secret from the DoD, DIA, CIA and one other agency. Weldon had Gaubatz Fedex 15 pages on locations of the alleged weapons sites to Weldon's staffer's home, so that it wouldn't go through congressional channels. "The Fedex receipt that is attached is the key to everything in regards to Weldon conducting the WMD issue behind doors for his own political reasons," Gaubatz sends in a note with the receipts. Gaubatz said that Weldon had Gaubatz check with the army base in Nasiriya to make sure they would have the digging equipment they would need, so that when they arrived there after flying commercially to Kuwait, without having informed anyone in the US government what they were going to do, they could commandeer the equipment and get to work. Meantime, after Gaubatz decided not to participate in the trip, after a conference call May 4th, because he feared Weldon was trying to turn this into a political stunt, Weldon's staff called Gaubatz and asked him to take down his website, something he has refused to do. I've been trying to get Weldon's side on this, but his office hasn't returned calls.