On March 24, CBS reporter Jim Axelrod, embedded with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, reported on curious objects possessed by captured Iraqi soldiers -- new gas masks, chemical decontamination kits, and the antidote for nerve gas, called atropine. "I will guess that they -- they're planning on using chemical warfare," Sgt. Jennifer Raichle told him. "They may or may not use it, but they're ready for it." The next day, "CAPTURED FOES FOUND WITH CHEM-WAR GEAR," was the New York Post headline. But it didn't seem that big a deal to those who knew a little bit about WMD. "One must ask how old these clothes are. They may have been there for a long time," Hans Blix, executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), said to Swedish Radio on March 29. "In any case, they haven't found any weapons yet."

On April 7, Fox News correspondent Mike Tobin at Centcom headquarters in Qatar reported on the discovery of barrels containing gallons of liquids testing positive in the field for chemical agents such as sarin. "The barrels have the potential to hold and store these chemical weapons," Tobin said. "Senior defense officials tell Fox News the presence of sarin, tabun or lewisite are being tested after  preliminary field tests showed they had found some of these weapons out in the field near Karbala. Two of those are nerve agents." Tobin went on to detail the havoc these nerve agents can wreak on the human body, according to the Centers for Disease Control -- convulsions, asphyxiation, death. "Lewisite is an odorless, blistering agent much like mustard," he went on. "It injures people by damaging the skin, kills them by damaging the tissue in their lungs, according, again, to the CDC."

At a Centcom briefing that day, Tobin asked a unnamed senior Centcom official if Gen. Franks had said "anything about these tests done at the sites turning up preliminary results of findings of chemical weapons?" The official immediately downplayed the discovery. "I think where Gen. Franks is on this, he'd be right where the secretary of defense is, which is that we need to get some more testing and look at these things very closely," the official said. "We all realize first reports are wrong."

What did the tests ultimately turn up? Gen. Freakly told CNN on Monday that the barrels held "high-grade pesticides."

Also on April 7, John Burnett of National Public Radio -- embedded with the 1st Marine Division -- reported that "a top military official" told him about "the first solid confirmed existence of chemical weapons by the Iraqi army." In a warehouse outside Baghdad, the official told Burnett, the 101st Airborne found about 20 BM-21 medium-range rockets with warheads containing sarin nerve gas and mustard gas."

"So this is really a major discovery, isn't it?" asked "Morning Edition" host Susan Stamberg. "If it turns out to be true, the commander told us this morning this would be a smoking gun," Burnett replied. "This would indicate the administration's claims that the Iraqis had chemicals all along."

At a Pentagon briefing the next day, Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, deputy director for operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he'd "seen nothing in official reports that would corroborate that."

Last Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that U.S. Marines had secured a city south of Baghdad -- Al-Tuwaitha -- where, underneath a building owned by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency, they found underground tunnels, labs and warehouses. The newspaper reported that 14 buildings had high levels of radiation. On April 11, Fox News host Sean Hannity trumpeted the report, announcing, "We may have found these smoking guns -- weapons-grade plutonium, bioweapons labs, all these things."

But Centcom spokesman Owens tells Salon, "I don't have anything to confirm what may or may not have been found there," about the Tribune-Review report. "It's one of a number of spots being checked out and investigated throughout the country." Owens agrees with Rumsfeld's exhortation about preliminary reports from the field and notes how his job differs from the media's. "Our emphasis is not on speed. It's accuracy."

The fact that the Pentagon itself is defusing these stories should bolster its credibility. But if the situation should change and the Pentagon was suddenly confirming, not denying, a story about the discovery of WMD, Rumsfeld's word won't be enough for the rest of the world.

The role of the United Nations, argues the Council on Foreign Relations' Feinstein, is crucial. "Like it or not, right or wrong, a lot of other countries view the U.N. as legitimizing international action and feel that without a U.N. stamp of approval international action isn't legitimate," Feinstein says. The United Nations, he argues, "is a place where the weak powers feel that they have a say." So whether Blix or Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, are brought in personally, their organizations should be there "to witness and document the find and their destruction," Feinstein insists.

This is not only because the groups have diverse compositions, including UNMOVIC commissioners from Muslim nations like Nigeria and Senegal, and skeptics of the United States like France and Germany, and IAEA members such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. It's also because the U.S. argument for the war wasn't particularly convincing to much of this international community. "The presentation of the facts was weak," Feinstein says. "It was sometimes overstated, sometimes based on doctoral theses, and it was thin, when it didn't need to be."

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