Republican candidates for President are saying the darndest things about the UN weapons inspectors who searched Iraq with a fine-toothed comb before Bush hastily pulled them out of Iraq just before unleashing his "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad on 3/19/03.

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney repeatedly says Saddam Hussein never let those inspectors into Iraq:

Well, it's a setting that's almost a null set. Which is, if we knew that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and if he had complied with the United Nations resolutions to allow IAEA inspectors into his country, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Hello Mitt? Saddam did allow IAEA inspectors into his country, gave them unfettered access to everything including Presidential palaces, and they found nothing:

On March 7, 2003 Muhammed ElBarradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency told the world, “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq.”

So where could Romney have gotten this lunatic idea? We don't have to look very far - he got it from the lunatic-in-chief himself:

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

Bush's statement was so insane that we created a petition at MadGeorge.us urging Bush to invoke the 25th Amendment (which allows a President to declare himself "incapacitated") and hand over his Presidential powers to Dick Cheney - just as Bush did on 6/29/02 when he had a colonoscopy. Thousands of sane Americans signed our petition.

Of course Bush's insane statement should have dominated the news for days, if not weeks or months. So why did the Washington Press Corpse and the Corporate Media completely ignore it? Because Karl Rove controls the Corporate Media, that's why.

When Saddam was deposed and "democracy" seemed possible in Iraq, many Americans were willing to overlook Bush's pre-war and post-war lies. But after 4 years, 3,500 US lives, and $400 billion - which are just the beginning of a 50-year occupation - Americans are no longer willing to buy Bush's lies.

It's time for the Corporate Media to take every statement about Iraq - from the Bush Administration and every Republican in office or running for office - and subject them to a lie-detector test.

While the various pre-war intelligence lies can be murky to those who are no immersed in all the details, the UN inspectors lie is clear and unambiguous.

If the Corporate Media can't challenge Mitt Romney and other Republicans who deny UN inspectors spent months in Iraq and found nothing, then it's time to put the Corporate Media out of business.

Update 1: Robert Parry has much more:

On Jan. 27, 2004, for example, Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution – 1441 – unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”...

At a March 21, 2006, news conference, Bush again blamed the war on Hussein’s defiance of U.N. demands for unfettered inspections.

“I was hoping to solve this [Iraq] problem diplomatically,” Bush said. “The world said, ‘Disarm, disclose or face serious consequences.’ … We worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny the inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did.”

Only two weeks ago, at a press conference on May 24, 2007, Bush offered a short-hand version, even inviting the journalists to remember the invented history.

“As you might remember back then, we tried the diplomatic route: [U.N. Resolution] 1441 was a unanimous vote in the Security Council that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. So the choice was his [Hussein’s] to make. And he made a choice that has subsequently caused him to lose his life.”

In the frequent repetition of this claim, Bush never acknowledges the fact that Hussein did comply with Resolution 1441 by declaring accurately that he had disposed of his WMD stockpiles and by permitting U.N. inspectors to examine any site of their choosing. [For more on Bush's Iraq War deceptions, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Killer Talking Points.”]

Prominent Washington journalists have even repeated Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

Of course, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But he did so in the real history, not in the faux reality that now governs Washington.