From the media-bias corner, my early two cents: the anti-war media has often used inaccurate hyperbole here when they have stated there were “no” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The discovery of a single canister of sarin makes that claim inaccurate, and the media are supposed to care about getting it right, even when they were not called upon it by top officials. For example, the January 18, 2005 Today show:

DAVID GREGORY: It’s clear, sir, there’s no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. President BUSH: Right.

The larger point here is that the news media are more interested in certain potential facts than in others. We found the Big Three networks just aired three and a half hours of morning and evening news coverage in just three weeks of the Haditha “Marine massacre” allegations. But they have next to no interest in digging through the Saddam archives, just as they had next to no interest in digging through Soviet archives or East German archives. Everyone should realize that the major media has a bad case of partisan tunnel vision, and not be intimidated out of building a historical record for future generations to understand.