I just came across this post from 2003, which I resurrect to prove how much smarter I was then (and remain today, despite intermittently firing synapses) than George Walker Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell:
ASSIMILATED PRESS, April 29: The search widened today for precursors to illicit weapons of mass destruction, as President Bush revealed that Saddam Hussein may have destroyed the actual weapons themselves before the start of the war.
“It would be just like him to have deceived us by telling the truth for once,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a former college wrestler nicknamed The Eel for his skill at escaping holds that would have pinned a less slippery grappler.
“It would also be just like him to have lied to us about telling the truth, expecting us to assume that the weapons existed. Or vice versa. Either way, the terrorists win.”
Pressed for clarification, the secretary quipped that he was smarter than the reporter and then called on a Pentagon embed who changed the subject.
When questioning later returned to the search for precursors, the secretary sighed over the idiocy of it all before saying, “In this business, my friend, you’re like a blind man with gloves on trying to pick up individual grains of sand at night in a country the size of California, or maybe it’s Colorado. Some really big state, anyway. Maybe Afghanistan …
“So anyway you could say, yes, we haven’t found anything, but then we never expected to find anything. The absence of presence doesn’t mean the presence of absence. The only valid measure of presence is our ongoing discovery of precursors all over the Province of Iraq. Where you have precursors, you’ve got proof positive of the potential existence of postcursors.”
Mr. Rumsfeld jovially dismissed suggestions that his inspection teams had “proved Saddam's case,” or “made us look like a lying sack of shit to the whole world.”
“Listen,” said the threateningly affable defense secretary, “wouldn’t you expect a man like Saddam to hide his weapons of mass destruction? Last time I checked, hidden means you can’t find them. In fact if we could find them, it would be proof that they weren’t hidden and consequently proof of their nonexistence because we happen to know they are hidden.
“We also know they exist, and not just because we downloaded the information from the official web site of the Project for the New American Century. Right now, today, it’s being fully confirmed by the precursors our men are discovering all over the Iraqi Protectorate.”
Precursors, in the language of weapons inspectors, are supplies or materials which are essential in the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Typical precursors are the so-called “wands” of vacuum cleaners, metal tubes that can easily be modified for use in the construction of nukular weapons. Other precursors are conventional artillery and mortar shells, which can quickly be emptied of their high explosive and refilled with Chanel No. 5 or, in a more likely scenario, poison gas.
The Pentagon’s Mobile Exploitation Team Bravo, nicknamed MET Bravo because exploitation is too hard to say, has uncovered literally thousands of such supposed “shells.”
The team has also mapped the locations of a great many suspiciously empty 55-gallon oil drums. Experts consider these likely precursors to full drums packed with biological or chemical germs or gas, or perhaps even the teensy weensy atomic bombs which our troops fondly call “cluster nukes.”
These successes have led the administration to triple the number of scientists and engineers assigned to Operation Precursor, to about 1,500. Their first task will be to uncover Saddam’s vast stockpiles of oxygen, an element essential to the super–rapid combustion which is at the heart of most modern weapons systems.
Already MET Bravo operatives have pinpointed for further inspection dozens of crude enclosures in rural areas of Iraq that contain large stockpiles of poultry guano and its larger cousin, bullshit. Both are well–known nitrogen precursors.
Nitrogen itself, experts note, is a precursor to many highly lethal weapons of mass destruction. It was in fact the principal ingredient used in the bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah federal building by Iraqi terrorist Timothy McVeigh.
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at May 31, 2006 12:38 PM