Holy Confusing Movies With Reality, Batman!

(above) Our nemesis Saddam Hussein, in
one of his many terrifying guises.

Radley Balko recorded Rep. Chris Cox's "We've found WMD!" speech at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. Here are Cox's exact words:

"We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and the facilities to make them inside of Iraq, and even more about their intended use, including that a plan to distribute sarin, and the lethal poison ricin -- in the United States and Europe -- was actively being pursued as late as March 2003. The facility where the weapons were being made also housed a large inventory of perfume atomizers of various shapes and sizes to mimic the brands on store shelves in the United States. It doesn't take a wild imagination to understand the chilling implications. It does take imagination to combat it. And that's why we're lucky have an administration that gets it."

Now, some people are wondering whether Cox was referring to anything real whatsoever, or whether this was wholly the product of his fevered imagination.

The answer is: this came mostly from the peculiar, overheated space between Cox's ears. However, it did have one very, very (very) small toehold in reality. Specifically, someone had probably told Cox a garbled version of something in Annex A of the Chemical Weapons section of the Duelfer report on Iraq's WMD. Here are the relevant excerpts:

A former IIS officer claimed that the M16 directorate had a plan to produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard in rifle grenades, and a plan to bottle Sarin and sulfur mustard in perfume sprayers and medicine bottles which they would ship to the United States and Europe. The source claimed that they could not implement the plan because chemicals to produce the CW agents were unavailable...

Future Plans To Produce CW Agent

ISG is unable to corroborate the sensitive reporting that the IIS was planning to produce nitrogen mustard, sulfur mustard, and Sarin, but assesses that if plans to produce chemical agent within the IIS existed, the M16 chemical preparation division would have been the group tasked with carrying them out.

* A former Iraqi intelligence officer reported that the M16 chemical preparation division planned to produce and weaponize nitrogen mustard using CS rifle grenades. The source provided ISG with two grenade launchers and cases of CS grenades he claimed M16 officers were supposed to modify.
* The same source later reported that the IIS had a plan to produce Sarin and sulfur mustard, which the IIS planned to distribute to the US and Europe. The source claimed that the director of M16, Nu�man Muhammad al-Tikriti, gave him a perfume-bottling machine that was to be used to help carry out this plan.

Both of these plans are extremely difficult to corroborate because:

* The reporting on this activity states it was never carried out.
* According to the source of the above information, only Fadil Abbas al-Husayni, Adnan Abdul Razzaq, Nu'man Muhammad al-Tikriti (the director of M16), and Tahir Jalil Habbush (the director of the IIS) knew details about the plans to produce chemical agent within M16.

So, let's run down Cox's specific claims and evaluate them:

• "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons..."

Completely false.

• "...and the facilities to make them inside of Iraq..."

Completely false.

• "...and even more about their intended use, including that a plan to distribute sarin, and the lethal poison ricin -- in the United States and Europe -- was actively being pursued as late as March 2003."

Almost, but not completely false. The excerpts above from the Duelfer report speak of a single, uncorroborated IIS source claiming there was a plan to distribute sarin and mustard (not sarin and ricin) via perfume bottles. Given America's experience so far with single, uncorroborated sources in Iraq, we may not want to give this too much weight. Moreover, even the source never claimed the plan could be carried out—because they had no sarin or mustard. There is also nothing I've seen in the Duelfer report that has the source claiming this was "being pursued as late as March 2003."

• "The facility where the weapons were being made..."

Completely false. There were no facilities to make weapons.

• "...housed a large inventory of perfume atomizers of various shapes and sizes to mimic the brands on store shelves in the United States..."

Below is a picture from the Duelfer report of the purported perfume atomizers. I haven't spent much time at perfume counters lately, so maybe someone who has should judge whether these "mimic the brands on store shelves in the United States."

• "It doesn't take a wild imagination to understand the chilling implications."

Completely true. All you need to do is watch the first Batman movie, in which the Joker (played by Jack Nicholson) brings Gotham to a halt with his nefarious poison perfume scheme. I'm sure Chris Cox has seen it. Whether he's aware it was a movie and not real is another question.