I protest.

Reinventing the obvious.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a story by Bob Drogin, "Banned Weapons Remain Unseen Foe," about the people who are conducting the so-far fruitless search for "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. It's hardly news that they have not been successful. They are also unhappy about missions like this one:

The latest U.S. intelligence, presented at a morning briefing here Friday and backed by satellite photos and reconnaissance reports, was specific and unnerving.

Saddam Hussein, a team of U.S. and Australian weapons hunters was told, may have built drone aircraft rigged with nozzles to spray poison gases, plus two short-range missiles with warheads designed to carry deadly chemicals or germs, at the former Ibn Firnas aeronautics research center.

…

Donning flak vests and helmets, and loading their weapons, the 26-member team climbed into six Humvees and SUVs and sped to the sprawling complex just north of the reeking trash mountains of the Baghdad city dump.

They quickly found the "drones": five burned and blackened 9-foot wings dumped near the front gate. "It could have been a student project, or maybe a model," the team's expert, U.S. Air Force Capt. Libbie Boehm, said with a shrug.

The "missiles" were found too, after a bit of searching through a junk heap: two discarded casings of artillery rockets.

Their "intelligence" resulted in the discovery of a few pieces of a model or student project and a couple of artillery rocket casings. No wonder they're unhappy. But it gets worse. Most of the more than 300 sites that the teams have investigates "were so heavily bombed or looted that any potential evidence was long gone."

Moreover, the teams have largely visited the same sites that U.N. inspectors searched last winter without result. They were never given any of the U.N. reports, so knew little about what was there before. Commanders have made such comparison more difficult by changing the names of some long-known U.N. sites.

Now the teams are reorganizing, with the new "Iraq Survey Group" taking responsibility for the search. Meanwhile,

Several of the seven current "sensitive site teams," or SSTs, conducted their last mission June 2 and have been told not to expect another until June 25 or later. Dozens of team members now spend each day washing clothes, taking naps and fighting boredom.

"We're here to answer the big question," said Lt. Cody Strong, a tactical intelligence officer. "You'd think if this was really a priority, we'd have nonstop missions."

Yeah, you would think that, wouldn't you? Even worse, those who are still working are working from a list created before the war; these lists have not been updated and are inaccurate:

In many cases, intelligence folders prepared for each site failed to note that bombing had turned the target to rubble.

"It's kind of frustrating -- futile really -- for us to drive eight hours to check out a crater," said Marine Lt. Col. Robert Q. Rowsey, commander of the team. "All of our targets were put on a list before the war."

Other team leaders complained that most intelligence folders appeared to be based solely on analysis of satellite imagery. Again and again, the intelligence proved wildly off-base.

Probably the best story is this one:

"The target folder for Uday's palace at Lake Habbaniyah was real clean," said U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Hann Jr., a highly decorated arms control expert who heads SST-6, referring to a complex for Hussein's older son. " 'There's the warehouse. There's the poison gas storage tanks.' Well, the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."

Cars in a carport, propane in propane tanks. One person said it best:

"I'm sitting here, and frustrated isn't the word anymore," said the official, who has a senior role in the hunt and spoke on condition of anonymity. "I feel almost duped."

Join the rest of the American people, man. Anyone who believed Bush, Cheney, et al, that Hussein had these weapons were, indeed, duped. But they are still hoping:

The Iraq Survey Group hopes to change all that. Instead of revisiting old U.N. sites, the group will focus on interviewing Iraqis and analyzing documents that already fill three warehouses. The goal is to find fresh clues about any lethal microbes or chemical agents, long-range missiles or enrichment technology for nuclear weapons -- all forbidden to Iraq under U.N. resolutions.

The [anonymous] intelligence officer [quoted above] said that common-sense approach should have been taken long ago. "These guys are reinventing the obvious," he said. "And that means they didn't see the obvious before."

So far, though, all they have found are conventional weapons, allowed under the U.N. resolutions. I will be very surprised, even shocked, if they do eventually find unequivocal evidence of recent (post-1991) nuclear, biological or chemical weapons activity. They aren't there, they weren't there before the war and I'm convinced that the President and his cronies either knew that and lied directly, or ignored the evidence that would have proven them wrong in their assertions.

They sent people to fight and die in Iraq, killing innocents and combatants alike, on the basis of the false claim that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States and other nations.