In the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze," the incomparable Holmes solved a mystery by an incident that did not happen.  The watchdog did not bark.  

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." 

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Well, the watchdog has finally barked, informing us, according to the New York Times, which received a report from the Pentagon last week

The United States recovered thousands of old chemical weapons in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 and destroyed almost all of them in secret and via open-air detonation, according to a written summary of its activities prepared by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international body that monitors implementation of the global chemical weapons treaty. (snip)

It included a table disclosing limited details on 95 separate recoveries and destructions of chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, for a total of 4,530 munitions from May 2004 through February 2009 — a period of often intense fighting in Iraq.

The United States later recovered more Iraqi chemical weapons, pushing its tally to 4,996 by early 2011, according to redacted intelligence documents obtained by The Times via the Freedom of Information Act.

The weapons destroyed through early 2009, the newly released report said, included some that contained chemical agents, others that were corroded and degraded, and some that appeared to have been previously demilitarized but that the United States destroyed “to err on the side of safety and security.”

Its authors noted that none of the weapons had been recently manufactured. All were legacy items from Iraq’s chemical weapons program in the 1980s and early 1990s. That program had been rushed into production during the Iran-Iraq War and then destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War and the period of United Nations inspections that followed.

“All munitions found were left over from pre-1991 Iraqi program,” the report said.

But, but...according to the self-styled watchdogs, the moral high-grounders, the persistent chanters of the title of this piece, in its insidious, deceitful, and lying original, there were no deadly weapons in Iraq under the benign reign of Saddam Hussein; the 35,000 gassed Kurds didn't really exist, no matter what the few survivors say, the evidence proves.   

But of course, acknowledging the existence of these horrible weapons of mass destruction that were used with deadly results would be admitting that Bush's decision to invade Iraq ultimately saved many lives.  Therefore, the persistent haters would have to concede they were wrong and – even worse – Bush was right.  And their deviant couplet wouldn't rhyme.

And so the attack dogs don't bark.  Because they're not watchdogs.

Not curious at all.