BY ROHAN PEARCE
In his September 23 address to the UN General Assembly, US President George Bush said that the "regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction. It used those weapons in acts of mass murder, and refused to account for them when confronted by the world... Our coalition has made sure that Iraq's former dictator will never again use weapons of mass destruction."
But he stopped short of asserting that Iraq actually possessed any WMD at the time the US invaded. "We are interviewing Iraqi citizens and analysing records of the old regime to reveal the full extent of its weapons programs and its long campaign of deception", said Bush.
A week earlier, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan replied to a journalist's question as to whether the US-led 1400-member Iraq Survey Group, headed by David Kay, would discover "not programs, not dual capabilities, not a history of efforts to acquire them, but actual weapons of mass destruction" by stating that the ISG is "talking to Iraqis, they're gathering all the intelligence to pull together a complete picture of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program and their weapons of mass destruction... yes, we still stand by what we've previously said."
However, according to the New York Times and the British Guardian, a draft report of the ISG has confirmed the obvious — there is no evidence that Iraq's former regime possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US invasion.
According the September 25 Guardian, a "US intelligence source" said the draft report "demonstrates that the main judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false". The NIE's "high confidence" assessments were:
- "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
- "[The US is] not detecting portions of these weapons programs."
- "Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles."
- "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."
A day before the Guardian and New York Times reports, the BBC's Andrew Neil revealed that, according to a "Bush administration source", no WMD have been found, despite the fact that US officials have previously claimed to have indisputable proof that they existed.
Indeed, on March 30, US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld even claimed that the Pentagon knew where the WMD were located. "We know where [the WMD] are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north of that", Rumsfeld said.
Neil reported that the "bottom line is that the [ISG] team has found no weapons of mass destruction". According to the BBC, Neil's source said the ISG's "report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed 'minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material'. They have also not uncovered any laboratories involved in deploying weapons of mass destruction and no delivery systems for the weapons."
"What we expected was nasty stuff", a US soldier who participated in the ISG's activities told Associated Press. "Exactly the pictures they painted on CNN and all the networks — nerve agents... I had just come out of school. I was inexperienced, if we found the weapons, it would have been good to be part of the group that found the evidence... I don't know what to think anymore."
In a press statement released on August 11, CIA director George Tenet stated: "We stand behind the judgments of the NIE as well as our analyses on Iraq's programs over the past decade. Those outside the process over the past 10 years and many of those commenting today do not know, or are misrepresenting, the facts."
Tenet claimed that the NIE "demonstrates consistency in our judgments over many years and are based on a decade's worth of work".
However, writing for the September 22 British Daily Mirror, left-wing journalist John Pilger revealed that in Cairo, in February 2001, US Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours".
Pilger's investigation, in preparation for a forthcoming television documentary on the US invasion of Iraq, further revealed that, in May 2001, "Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to 'build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction' for 'the last 10 years'".
Powell's February 2001 assessment appears to have been upheld even by the work of the ISG. For example, AP reported on September 19 that a three-month investigation by a group of US scientists in Iraq dubbed "Team Pox" confirmed that there was no evidence of Iraqi production of smallpox. AP reported that they found only "disabled equipment that had been rendered harmless by UN inspectors, Iraqi scientists deemed credible who gave no indication they had worked with smallpox, and a laboratory thought to be back in use that was covered in cobwebs".
In a February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council, Powell claimed that Iraq "has the wherewithal to develop smallpox".
Only five days before the AP report, US Vice-President Dick Cheney claimed on NBC's Meet the Press that the US inspectors had found facilities capable of producing smallpox — referring to the "mobile biolabs" which an investigation by the British Observer, published June 8, established were most likely for "hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons".
The Observer investigation's conclusion about the "mobile biolabs" was backed up by Pentagon intelligence analysts. According to an August 13 article by Joseph Cirincione, director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Non-Proliferation Project, "engineering experts from the [Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency] had concluded in June that hydrogen production was, in fact, the most likely use for the two trailers".
Another blow to the White House's credibility was the Wall Street Journal's September 10 revelation that "top policymakers" in the Bush regime would have known that the US Air Force disagreed that Iraq had unpiloted aerial vehicles capable of carrying out chemical or biological weapons attacks on the US. Bush and Powell both claimed that Iraq could attack the United States with UAVs.
Kay's report, barring some spectacular falsification of evidence, may argue that Hussein's regime intended to resurrect WMD programs after UN inspectors had left the country and economic sanctions against Iraq had been lifted. The argument for such a scenario is likely to be the existence of so-called "dual-use" facilities — factories and laboratories which, although they have non-weapons purposes such as pesticide manufacture, are claimed by the US to be capable of being used to manufacture chemical and/or biological weapons.
Such a case would bear little resemblance to the White House's pre-invasion claims that Hussein's regime had massive stockpiles of bioweapons and nerve gas and an active nuclear program, and therefore posed an "imminent threat" to the US.
The August 28 Boston Globe reported that Kay "will build a strong, but largely circumstantial case that Hussein dispersed his weapons programs... The case will be based on interviews with captured Iraqi leaders, documents from government files, discoveries including a pre-1991 nuclear centrifuge for enriching uranium found buried in a scientist's backyard garden, and components of possible weapons systems found in various areas of the country."
However, the September 25 Boston Globe reported that Kay is likely to leave unanswered the question of whether of not Iraq had WMD at the time of the US invasion. "Don't expect any firm conclusions. He will not rule in or rule out anything", a spokesperson for the CIA told the Globe on September 24.
From Green Left Weekly, October 1, 2003.
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