Glenn Greenwald brings it all back to refresh the memories of the crazy reports circulated by the media … or more specifically, by ABC News.

(This is a followup to my earlier post.)

What I remembered at the time was that the Saddam claim was made, then others refuted it, making it clear to people paying close attention that the source was clearly the Maryland facilities. Yet I also recall how many chose to refute the refutations as if they had a divine eye that permitted them to know it could not possibly have been the work of an American.

In that regard, I don’t agree with Glenn. I don’t think that tie to Saddam persisted in the public mind for years afterward, except indirectly. Most of the media focused on Hatfill, who’s been exonerated. However, where the continued impact was felt was in the reported lack of accounting for bioweapons stocks Saddam was known to have at the end of the first Gulf War.

Subsequent to Saddam’s toppling, it was discovered that it was simply poor accounting, that the stocks no longer existed. And Saddam did not have any motivation to correct the record because:

a) the fear of those weapons helped keep neighboring enemies from attacking Iraq and

b) nobody ever accepted hisreports as facts anyway (something he deserved some blame for, because, like many national leaders, he regularly lied).

The mainstream media as a whole was more complicit in promoting scary myths, like the claim that chemical weapons and bioweapons were properly grouped together with nukes as weapons of mass destruction at all. Nukes are more deadly by at least hundreds of multiples than any other weapons. There has never been a chemical attack that caused a thousand deaths, while the very small nuke that took out Hiroshima killed at least 100,000. Relative to the anthrax reports, it has always been a fact that an effective method of distributing a biological weapon has yet to be created. Though some posed potential ways such applications could occur, the worst of those fell short of what 18 hijackers were able to do with boxcutter knives and airliners.

So we attacked Iraq because Saddam might possess weapons of mythical deceptions about strength. Deceptions the entire mainstream media was happy to assert.

Greenwald is exactly right to point out that ABC News is preserving no sacred right by protecting the sources of deliberate propaganda whose intent was to drive us into war for make pretend reasons. Hundreds of thousands have died because of those secret propaganda spreaders. Did Ivins tell them that? Cheney? Feith? Addison? Rove?

The Congressional investigation must ask that question. Because ABC News is shielding criminals whose lies resulted in the deaths of more American troops than the number of people killed on 9-11.