Munitions Found in Iraq Renew Debate

Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.) asked whether the munitions could be characterized as "the Golden Oldies of weapons of mass destruction." Maples said he was "not sure what Golden Oldies are" but added that the munitions were "dangerous. . . . even in a degraded mode, they will produce hazardous and potentially lethal effects and that we would categorize them as weapons of mass destruction."

But under questioning, Maples acknowledged that the shells were "a potential risk to our service members in Iraq" but not to 275 million Americans.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who believes the shells represent weapons of mass destruction, asked: "If you took that material and got it out of the country and took it to a metropolitan area, what would be the impact?"

Maples replied, "I think conceivably it would have a very large impact."

That caused Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.) to ask, "If some bad guys got this stuff and sneaked it into New York City and put it [into] the subways there, would it kill people?" Taken aback slightly, Maples responded, "Potentially . . . yes, sir, it would."

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."

The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."