NEWS: Inspector: BUSH LIED! "Iraq had no WMD before invasion"
Final report says Saddam had ambitions, but no chem or bio arms
MSNBC News Services
Updated: 2:27 p.m. ET Oct. 6, 2004
msnbc.msn.com
WASHINGTON - Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons before last year’s U.S.-led invasion and its nuclear program had decayed since the 1991 Gulf War, according to a weapons inspector appointed by the Bush administration.
The assessment contrasted with statements by President Bush before the invasion, when he cited a growing threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as the reason for overthrowing President Saddam Hussein.
“I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq,” Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said in testimony prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee. His prepared remarks were obtained by Reuters before the 2:30 p.m. ET hearing.
Nuclear weapons program deteriorated
Duelfer said Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War, but he said Saddam did not abandon his nuclear ambitions.
The issue has figured prominently in the campaign for the Nov. 2 presidential election, with Bush’s Democratic opponent John Kerry saying Bush rushed to war without allowing U.N. inspections enough time to check out Iraq’s armaments.
Bush has given varying justifications for the war. He said in a speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday that the concern was that terrorists would get banned weapons from Saddam.
“There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks,” Bush said.
“In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” he said, referring to the 2001 attacks on the United States attributed to al-Qaida.
Duelfer did reveal a threat that he said had emerged since he last briefed Congress on the status of the WMD hunt — a connection between chemical weapons experts from Saddam’s former regime with insurgents fighting the U.S.-led forces now in Iraq.
Threat posed by insurgents
“I believe we got ahead of this problem through a series of raids throughout the spring and summer. I am convinced we successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat,” Duelfer said.
“Nevertheless, it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands,” he said.
Duelfer said that by the time of the war in 2003, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in months and nerve agent in less than a year.
“We have not come across explicit guidance from Saddam on this point, yet it was an inherent consequence of his decision to develop a domestic chemical production capacity,” Duelfer said.
Duelfer said that “despite Saddam’s expressed desire to retain the knowledge of his nuclear team, and his attempts to retain some key parts of the program (after 1991), during the course of the following 12 years Iraq’s ability to produce a weapon decayed.”
Duelfer briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors about his report in the morning and was to testify later at an open Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
‘Little work done on warheads’
“While it is clear that Saddam wanted a long-range missile, there was little work done on warheads. It is apparent that he drew the line at that point ... so long as sanctions remained,” Duelfer said in his prepared remarks.
One of Saddam’s priorities was to escape U.N. sanctions, he said.
“Over time, sanctions had steadily weakened to the point where Iraq, in 2000-2001, was confidently designing missiles around components that could only be obtained outside sanctions,” Duelfer said.
Duelfer’s key conclusion tallied with that of his predecessor, David Kay, who said when he stepped down in January that no large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons existed in Iraq when the United States went to war.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday the report will conclude “that Saddam Hussein had the intent and the capability, that he was pursuing an aggressive strategy to bring down the sanctions, the international sanctions, imposed by the United Nations through illegal financing procurement schemes.”
Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and maintaining industrial capability that could be converted to produce weapons, officials have said. Duelfer also describes Saddam’s Iraq as having had limited research efforts into chemical and biological weapons.
Saddam’s government fell in early April 2003 after a lightning U.S.-led invasion in mid-March. He was captured in December.
White House on the defensive
Duelfer’s report comes in a week that the White House has been put on the defensive in a number of Iraq issues.
Remarks by L. Paul Bremer, former U.S. administrator in occupied Iraq, suggested he argued for more troops in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when looting was rampant. A spokesman for Bush’s re-election campaign said Bremer indeed differed with military commanders.
President Bush’s election rival, Democrat John Kerry, pounced on Bremer’s statements that the United States “paid a big price” for having insufficient troop levels. On weapons, however, the Massachusetts senator has said he still would have voted to authorize the invasion even if he had known none would be found.
The White House maintained Duelfer’s report supports its view on Iraq’s prewar threat.
“The report will continue to show that he was a gathering threat that needed to be taken seriously, that it was a matter of time before he was going to begin pursuing those weapons of mass destruction,” McClellan said.
Compare that to the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26, 2002, 6½ months before the invasion:
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
The Iraq threat
The president made similar charges, laying out in an Oct. 7, 2002, speech what he described as Iraq’s threat:
“It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.”
“We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas.”
“Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles — far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations — in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work. “
What U.S. forces found:
A single artillery shell filled with two chemicals that, when mixed while the shell was in flight, would have created sarin. U.S. forces learned of it only when insurgents, apparently believing it was filled with conventional explosives, tried to detonate it as a roadside bomb in May in Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers suffered from symptoms of low-level exposure to the nerve agent. The shell was from Saddam’s pre-1991 stockpile.
Another old artillery shell, also rigged as a bomb and found in May, showed signs it once contained mustard agent.
Two small rocket warheads, turned over to Polish troops by an informer, that showed signs they once were filled with sarin.
Centrifuge parts buried in a former nuclear scientist’s garden in Baghdad. These were part of Saddam’s pre-1991 nuclear program, which was dismantled after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The scientist also had centrifuge design documents.
A vial of live botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, in another scientist’s refrigerator. The scientist said it had been there since 1993.
Evidence of advanced design work on a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 620 miles. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been prohibited from having missiles with ranges longer than 93 miles.
The Iraq Survey Group did not deal with whether Saddam’s government had contacts with members of the al-Qaida network, a matter that remains subject to wide debate. |
