08Jan04-The weapons that weren't
01/08/2004
THE U.S. SEARCH for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down without finding any weapons. U.S. investigators have closed their files on Iraq's chemical and nuclear program. Military forces assigned to the Iraq Survey Group are being diverted to other tasks. And David Kay, head of the Survey Group, is reportedly considering resigning.
Still, U.S. and British officials refuse to concede what is becoming increasingly obvious: All of the evidence to date indicates that the prewar assessments were way off.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair told British troops last month that Mr. Kay's group had produced "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories, (and) workings by scientists." But when a British reporter read Mr. Blair's assessment to L. Paul Bremer - minus Mr. Blair's name - the U.S. administrator in Baghdad said, "I don't know where those words come from, but that is not what David Kay has said." After Mr. Bremer was told the source of the quote, he added in embarrassment, "There is actually a lot of evidence."
Meanwhile, back in the states, Stuart Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, appeared Tuesday night on ABC's "Nightline" to insist that it is "nonsense" to suggest that intelligence officials shaded their judgments to gin up support for the war. Yet Mr. Kay has said quite clearly, "We have not found, at this point, actual weapons."
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Mr. Kay's investigators have found no evidence to support the main weapons claims made before the war in London and Washington. They found no work on old germ warfare agents such as anthrax, no evidence of resumed production of VX nerve agents and no active nuclear weapons program. Before the war, President George W. Bush had called the nuclear weapons program a "grave and gathering danger," and Vice President Dick Cheney termed it a "mortal threat."
As for the two trailers that U.S. authorities pointed to last spring as the "strongest evidence" of a hidden biological warfare program, both are now thought to have been involved in making hydrogen for weather balloons used by Iraqi artillery units. Mr. Kay has described the trailer incident as a "fiasco."
More exotic claims, that Iraq was trying to engineer a "chimera" by combining the genetic material of pox virus with cobra venom, for instance, have been found to be far beyond the capabilities of the Iraqi scientists.
One banned program that did exist, at least on paper, was for construction of a missile with a range of 625 miles, which could have threatened Mideast capitals. But the hidden designs were far from production and computer testing was rudimentary, the Post reported.
Altogether, the distortions and exaggerations amount to a major misuse of intelligence. The nation needs a tough, nonpartisan investigation to get to the bottom of this failure in order to guard against a president again leading the nation into war based on seriously flawed information and hype.
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