NY Times Still Claiming Nobody Knew Iraq Had No Weapons

From Peter Hart at FAIR:

Bolton's twice-repeated allusion to conspiracy theories is really interesting. The way I read it,  he would seem to be saying that only a nut would have claimed that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles before the US-led war.  It's a key talking point for the Iraq War's architects and supporters: We only said what every other sensible person was saying. The Times lets it pass, which is unfortunate, because if that's indeed what Bolton was referring to, it's false.

If you look at FAIR's Iraq and the Media timeline, for instance, and you'll see that former weapons inspector Scott Ritter had written a column for the Baltimore Sun (9/1/02) where he argued:

From 1991 to 1998, UN weapons inspectors, among whom I played an integral part, were able to verifiably ascertain a 90 percent to 95 percent level of disarmament inside Iraq. This included all of the production facilities involved with WMD, together with their associated production equipment and the great majority of what was produced by these facilities.

 A few days later, Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder (9/6/02) reported that

there is no new intelligence that indicates the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs, said a US intelligence official who argues that Cheney's and Rumsfeld's focus on Iraq is hurting the hunt for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terrorist network.

And one of the most explosive revelations was Newsweek's scoop (2/24/03) that the star witness in the case against Saddam Hussein actually told the inspectors that the weapons had been destroyed. Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Hussein's, had been debriefed in 1995, and claimed that "all weapons–biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."