On the heels of a news report from several weeks ago few read or heard , another breakthrough on discovering the nature of Saddam Hussein's thirst for the most powerful weapons:

On June 9, [Acting Executive Chairman of United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.

What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam — complete with U.N. inspection tags — and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters — the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

...The implications of the United Nations' discovery of how Hussein's regime got rid of many of its banned weapons programs is staggering, especially considering that it happened partly under the watch of U.N. weapons inspectors. And yet many in the media are either unwilling or unable to break out of their cycle of waiting to report the next terrorist attack. The truth about the justification for the war and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is gradually being revealed to the world, but it seems our journalists don't want to tell the story.

There's more to the article, all of it worth your time. At first glance, it seems bizarre that Saddam would surreptitiously dismantle weapons and manufacturing sites, rather than proudly and openly to draw attention to feigned cooperation. As I surmised shortly after his capture, however, Saddam is a survivor. It can't be underestimated how confident the brutal old man would be in his ability to strip out as much incriminating material as possible, patiently gain political support for his release from international attention and then quietly rebuild his arsenal.

A skeptic could argue that, indeed, these aren't stockpiles that have become the chattering classes' white elephant to wave in front of the Bush administration. But then, the WMD case was one of several reasons to depose Saddam Hussein, and the weapons threat extended far beyond existing stockpiles — in fact, Saddam's capability and intent to produce anew were major Clinton and Bush White House arguments, corroborated by Iraqi Survey Group leader David Kay's final report. Nor has Iraq been fully canvassed, or the Syrian connection explored to any degree. And a skeptic is likely to be a bureau-internationalist, a strong supporter of UN-mandated international law; so what of the fact that every one of these discoveries, including those from Kay's report, exposes Saddam's flagrant violation of Resolution 1441 and every resolution that came before it? An agreement is an agreement, and laws matter, especially with the United Nations, right? Right?

The article ends with a critical turn on the press. That's fair and accurate — a heartbreaking reality at this point in Iraq's reconstruction is the transformation of leftist rhetoric, purposely or carelessly, into urban myth. But more importantly, as I heard mentioned earlier today: when will we hear from the president on this? Lies, like the one trying to bury years of irrefutable evidence against Saddam, don't fall down their own.