Emily Latella Dept.

Not only can't they find chemical weapons from when they claim Saddam had them, they can't even find them from when they know he did.

Copenhagen (Reuters, January 14) - The Danish Army said on Wednesday initial tests showed a cache of mortar rounds found buried in Iraq on January 9 did not contain any chemical substances as originally suspected.

"The expert group from the Iraq Survey Group have investigated five ... and none of them have showed any trace of chemical substances," the Danish Army Operational Command said in a statement.

Samples would be sent to the United States for further tests and the results were expected within three to five days, the command said.

Those results would be conclusive, so it's possible - just possible - that some chemical agent will still be found in the shells, which are assumed by the US military to be leftovers from the Iran-Iraq war. But now it seems more likely that this will just be another "never mind." And there have been enough of those as Fox News (of all places) reminds us.

In October, Dutch marines found several dozen artillery shells dating to the 1991 Gulf War in southern Iraq, but the shells contained no biological or chemical agents. In April, U.S. troops found a dozen 55-gallon drums in northern Iraq. Preliminary tests found possible evidence of a nerve agent and a blister agent, but later tests found the contents were not chemical weapons. ...

During the war, potential chemical and biological findings were sent to a U.S. government laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md., and to a British government laboratory in Portendown, Britain. In some cases, a third set was sent to the United Nations' chemical weapons watchdog agency in The Hague, Netherlands. All the tests came back negative.

Since the war ended, the U.S.-led coalition has found several caches that tested positive for mustard gas but later turned out to contain missile fuel or other chemicals.

Other discoveries early in the U.S.-led occupation turned out to be old caches that already had been tagged by U.N. inspectors and were scheduled for destruction.

I could almost start to feel sorry for them.

Nah.