"And the response was that Saddam already had the weapons so, at any time, he could attack his neighbors or give some to terrorists."
Strategic Choices, Intelligence Challenges
Robert Hutchings
Chairman, National Intelligence Council
"There was broad agreement, within governments and outside, about Iraq’s WMD programs – based on UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, foreign intelligence, and US Government assessments made over three administrations.
I was just in Europe a few weeks ago and reconfirmed that the British, French, and Germans all held the same basic judgments that we did.
Third, there was a powerful body of evidence on programs and a compelling basis for judging that they had weapons. The fixation is now on the weapons, but the programs – the capacity of a regime that had actually used CW on ten separate occasions to weaponize large quantities on short notice – were arguably just as worrying."
"as to the weapons themselves, the amounts of CW we estimated Iraq to have had would fit in a backyard swimming pool or, at the upper limit of our estimate, in a small warehouse. A tremendously lethal arsenal of BW could of course be much smaller. And this in a country the size of California."
"as David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, has pointed out, there were ample opportunities before, during and after the war to hide or destroy evidence as well as weapons. We may never know definitively what Iraq had at the time the war began"
odci.gov |
