It is hard to forget the baseless charge Democrats, including Barack Obama, made against President George W. Bush, when they said he lied about why the U.S. targeted Iraq back in 2003.

Even with satellite images showing questionable convoys of vehicles leaving known chemical weapons storage facilities in Iraq, the media still ran with the narrative that WMD’s stockpiles were never there, simply because U.S. troops found these facilities vacant months after first setting foot in Iraq.

The chemicals were there, and even President Bill Clinton himself said they were there.

Now a New York Times report says that the Pentagon has “suppressed” the findings of these weapons in which U.S. troops were exposed to. The Times says that these were old weapons, not the ones that Bush identified as being a threat to the western world.

But just how many weapons were found?

American troops reported finding approximately 5,000 chemical warheads, shells, or aviation bombs in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On at least six occasions, soldiers were wounded by those weapons, which had been manufactured before 1991. In all, the paper reported that 17 U.S. soldiers and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to chemical agents during the war. The U.S. government said its number was slightly higher, but did not release a specific figure.

Bush also said that one of the reason for going to war was to stop Islamic terrorism.

Enter ISIS.

Most of the agents were discovered around the Muthanna State Establishment northwest of Baghdad, which had been a center of chemical weapons production in the 1980s. The complex has been held by Islamic State militants since June.

The Iraqi government told the United Nations that approximately 2,500 chemical rockets remained on the grounds of the facility when it had fallen to the militants.

In the months after the 2003 invasion, The Times reports, the Pentagon first made searching for chemical weapons a lower priority in the midst of attacks from insurgents, then withheld data from high-level investigations, including the Iraq Study Group in 2004 and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2006.

During the latter investigation, the paper reports, U.S. soldiers discovered more than 2,400 chemical rockets, some containing sarin gas, at a former Republican Guard compound. All appeared to have been buried before the first Gulf War in 1991.-NY Times

The Times says that it appears that these weapons were buried, not that they were definitely buried. 

In keeping with its true liberal and biased form, the Washington Post is stating that “these were not the “weapons of mass destruction” the George W. Bush administration used to justify invading Iraq in 2003”.

“The weapons were not the military threat to the United States described by the Bush administration. But the deadly sarin and mustard gas agents troops found were potent enough to cause injury, the paper reported. Unaware of the munitions’ content — which sometimes spilled on to their clothes and skin — as many as 17 soldiers were exposed, and some received haphazard, inadequate medical care…The Times story suggests the Pentagon suppressed information about the chemical weapons because of the injuries, because it would have highlighted the massive intelligence failure surrounding the war and because the weapons were “built in close collaboration with the West.”-WaPo

There you have it.

The media trying to protect their narrative that Bush lied about the Iraq war.

To be fair, this is Bush’s own fault. He should have gone into Iraq and secured the chemical weapons stockpiles first, instead of telegraphing his moves, which gave the Saddam Hussein ample time to move the weapons to Syria, where they are suspected of being stored.