Two strikes against the enemies of humanity in Iraq. The first, what the military believes is a significant amputation of terrorist operation:

U.S. forces uncovered a facility where car and roadside bombs were made, and detained 51 people believed linked to an insurgent cell, U.S. military officials said Saturday. Soldiers from the 1st Battalion 8th Cavalry Regiment discovered four vehicles that were to be potentially used as car bombs and several assembled roadside bombs. ...The detainees are all suspected of being members of an insurgent cell responsible for placing roadside bombs that have killed two U.S. soldiers in the area.

That's a good find in a city with geography nearly as broad as New York City. And in a country the size of California:

Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday.

Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23.

"Laboratory tests showed the presence in them of cyclosarin, a very toxic gas, five times stronger than sarin and five times more durable," Bieniek told Poland's TVN24 at the force's Camp Babylon headquarters.

...The munitions were found in a bunker in the Polish sector, but Polish officials refused to be more specific.

Section C, subsection 8a of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991 states that: "Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities." Contrary to the teachings of domestic politics, there is no leeway on what the meaning of "all" is. Saddam Hussein's regime was one for meticulous records, so the advocates of conventional wisdom must prove how and why an anomaly in Ba'athist control over every aspect of life and work in Iraq centered on its most powerful assets. As of 1998, the discrepancy between the number of chemical munitions Saddam's Iraq claimed to have destroyed unilaterally but remained unverified by the United Nations Special Commission numbered 31,000. Today's emerging picture is one where Saddam's word on his treatment of the Iraqi people was as worthless as his denial of weapons possession. It is believed that Saddam murdered into the millions; 350,000 bodies have been found in mass graves. The long list of Saddam's undestroyed arsenal from the UNSCOM days can be read by all; and now dozens of munitions have been discovered.

This is evidence that should poleaxe the past year's recriminations against President Bush, reckless sloganeering that, at worst, implies that Saddam Hussein was the man with truth on his side. One can only hope that the national debate has some flexibility left to it. The Polish commander was unambiguous on the devastation the cyclosarin could have caused, and one of the immediate justifications for deposing Saddam Hussein was to not leave the chance for one of those munitions' purchase by the wrong sorts of people to the oversight of a sworn enemy.

BURYING THE LEDE, EVIDENCE: The big reversal touted by the press now is that "none" of the munitions reported earlier by the Poles contains sarin gas. A qualifier is that two of the rockets were found to have "traces" of the chemical weapon. Since when does a man whose house contains "traces" of, say, a murder victim's blood not come under suspicion? Sarin gas is sarin gas, and it was found in undestroyed munitions. [Even if this correction were accurate], the point is as it's always been: Saddam could not be trusted once sanctions were lifted, his weapons divisions showed every indication of launching new programs under newfound cover and his history of working with terrorists raised the specter of cutouts armed with catastrophe. The left's revision of history and the political classes' savaging of the intelligence community is shameless.

THE POLES DON'T BUY IT: They're standing by their report. Words we need to hear:

"They were missiles that were made 15 years ago, which should have been destroyed and were not. They would certainly have very dangerous had they fallen into the hands of terrorists," said Deputy Defense Minister Janusz Zemke.

This counter needs press time. If need be, details of testing methods need to be compared.