No, I just liked the summary, and it took up less room than the items from the report. Here is some material directly from the interim report:
With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information – including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.
Debriefings of IIS officials and site visits have begun to unravel a clandestine network of laboratories and facilities within the security service apparatus. This network was never declared to the U.N. and was previously unknown. We are still working on determining the extent to which this network was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW terror weapons, but this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW capable facilities and continuing R&D – all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production. The IIS also played a prominent role in sponsoring students for overseas graduate studies in the biological sciences, according to Iraqi scientists and IIS sources, providing an important avenue for furthering BW-applicable research. This was the only area of graduate work that the IIS appeared to sponsor.
Discussions with Iraqi scientists uncovered agent R&D work that paired overt work with nonpathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents. Examples include: B. thurengiensis (Bt) with B. anthracis (anthrax), and medicinal plants with ricin. In a similar vein, two key former BW scientists, confirmed that Iraq under the guise of legitimate activity developed refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents. The scientists discussed the development of improved, simplified fermentation and spray drying capabilities for the simulant Bt that would have been directly applicable to anthrax, and one scientist confirmed that the production line for Bt could be switched to produce anthrax in one week if the seed stock were available.
A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from U.N. inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the U.N. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery – hidden in the home of a BW scientist – illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.
Additional information is beginning to corroborate reporting since 1996 about human testing activities using chemical and biological substances, but progress in this area is slow given the concern of knowledgeable Iraqi personnel about their being prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing we have discovered rules out their potential use in BW production.
We have made significant progress in identifying and locating individuals who were reportedly involved in a mobile program, and we are confident that we will be able to get an answer to the questions as to whether there was a mobile program and whether the trailers that have been discovered so far were part of such a program.
Chemical weapons search
Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons. For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASPs), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.
While searching for retained weapons, ISG teams have developed multiple sources that indicate that Iraq explored the possibility of CW production in recent years, possibly as late as 2003. When Saddam had asked a senior military official in either 2001 or 2002 how long it would take to produce new chemical agents and weapons, he told ISG that after he consulted with CW experts in OMI (Iraq's Military Industrial Organization) he responded it would take six months for mustard. Another senior Iraqi chemical weapons expert, in responding to a request in mid-2002 from Odai Hussein for CW for the Fedayeen Saddam, estimated that it would take two months to produce mustard and two years for sarin.
We are starting to survey parts of Iraq's chemical industry to determine if suitable equipment and bulk chemicals were available for chemical weapons production. We have been struck that two senior Iraqi officials volunteered that if they had been ordered to resume CW production Iraq would have been willing to use stainless steel systems that would be disposed of after a few production runs, in place of corrosive-resistant equipment which they did not have.
We continue to follow leads on Iraq's acquisition of equipment and bulk precursors suitable for a CW program. Several possibilities have emerged and are now being exploited. One example involves a foreign company, with offices in Baghdad, that imported in the past into Iraq dual-use equipment and maintained active contracts through 2002. Its Baghdad office was found looted in August 2003, but we are pursuing other locations and associates of the company.
Information obtained since OIF has identified several key areas in which Iraq may have engaged in proscribed or undeclared activity since 1991, including research on a possible VX stabilizer, research and development for CW-capable munitions, and procurement/concealment of dual-use materials and equipment.
Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told ISG that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW program after 1991. Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce and fill new CW munitions was reduced – if not entirely destroyed – during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections. We are carefully examining dual-use, commercial chemical facilities to determine whether these were used or planned as alternative production sites.
We have also acquired information related to Iraq's CW doctrine and Iraq's war plans for OIF, but we have not yet found evidence to confirm prewar reporting that Iraqi military units were prepared to use CW against Coalition forces. Our efforts to collect and exploit intelligence on Iraq's chemical weapons program have thus far yielded little reliable information on post-1991 CW stocks and CW agent production, although we continue to receive and follow leads related to such stocks. We have multiple reports that Iraq retained CW munitions made prior to 1991, possibly including mustard – a long-lasting chemical agent – but we have to date been unable to locate any such munitions.
With regard to Iraq's nuclear program, the testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. They have told ISG that Saddam Hussein remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons. These officials assert that Saddam would have resumed nuclear weapons development at some future point. Some indicated a resumption after Iraq was free of sanctions. At least one senior Iraqi official believed that by 2000 Saddam had run out of patience with waiting for sanctions to end and wanted to restart the nuclear program. The Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), beginning around 1999, expanded its laboratories and research activities and increased its overall funding levels. This expansion may have been in initial preparation for renewed nuclear weapons research, although documentary evidence of this has not been found, and this is the subject of continuing investigation by ISG.
Starting around 2000, the senior Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and high-level Ba'ath Party official Dr. Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development. These initiatives did not in and of themselves constitute a resumption of the nuclear weapons program, but could have been useful in developing a weapons-relevant science base for the long-term. We do not yet have information indicating whether a higher government authority directed Sa'id to initiate this research and, regretfully, Dr. Sa'id was killed on April 8th during the fall of Baghdad when the car he was riding in attempted to run a coalition roadblock.
Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material. However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program.
According to documents and testimony of Iraqi scientists, some of the key technical groups from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program remained largely intact, performing work on nuclear-relevant dual-use technologies within the Military Industrial Commission (MIC). Some scientists from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program have told ISG that they believed that these working groups were preserved in order to allow a reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program, but none of the scientists could produce official orders or plans to support their belief.
In some cases, these groups performed work which could help preserve the science base and core skills that would be needed for any future fissile material production or nuclear weapons development. Several scientists – at the direction of senior Iraqi government officials – preserved documents and equipment from their pre-1991 nuclear weapon-related research and did not reveal this to the U.N./IAEA. One Iraqi scientist recently stated in an interview with ISG that it was a "common understanding" among the scientists that material was being preserved for reconstitution of nuclear weapons-related work.
The ISG nuclear team has found indications that there was interest, beginning in 2002, in reconstituting a centrifuge enrichment program. Most of this activity centered on activities of Dr. Sa'id that caused some of his former colleagues in the pre-1991 nuclear program to suspect that Dr. Sa'id, at least, was considering a restart of the centrifuge program. We do not yet fully understand Iraqi intentions, and the evidence does not tie any activity directly to centrifuge research or development.
Exploitation of additional documents may shed light on the projects and program plans of Dr. Khalid Ibrahim Sa'id. There may be more projects to be discovered in research placed at universities and private companies. Iraqi interest in reconstitution of a uranium enrichment program needs to be better understood through the analysis of procurement records and additional interviews.
With regard to delivery systems, the ISG team has discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if OIF had not occurred, dramatically breached U.N. restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.
Detainees and cooperative sources indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of ballistic missiles with ranges of at least 400 kilometers and up to 1,000 kilometers and that measures to conceal these projects from UNMOVIC (the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) were initiated in late 2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors. Work was also underway for a clustered-engine liquid-propellant missile, and it appears the work had progressed to a point to support initial prototype production of some parts and assemblies. According to a cooperating senior detainee, Saddam concluded that the proposals from both the liquid-propellant and solid-propellant missile design centers would take too long. For instance, the liquid-propellant missile project team forecast first delivery in six years. Saddam countered in 2000 that he wanted the missile designed and built inside of six months. On the other hand, several sources contend that Saddam's range requirements for the missiles grew from 400 to 500 kilometers in 2000 to 600 to 1,000 kilometers in 2002.
ISG has gathered testimony from missile designers at Al Kindi State Company that Iraq has reinitiated work on converting SA-2 Surface-to-Air Missiles into ballistic missiles with a range goal of about 250 kilometers. Engineering work was reportedly underway in early 2003, despite the presence of UNMOVIC. This program was not declared to the U.N. ISG is presently seeking additional confirmation and details on this project. A second cooperative source has stated that the program actually began in 2001, but that it received added impetus in the run-up to OIF, and that missiles from this project were transferred to a facility north of Baghdad. This source also provided documentary evidence of instructions to convert SA-2s into surface-to-surface missiles.
ISG has obtained testimony from both detainees and cooperative sources that indicate that proscribed-range solid-propellant missile design studies were initiated, or already under way, at the time when work on the clustered liquid-propellant missile designs began. The motor diameter was to be 800 to 1,000 millimeters, i.e. much greater than the 500-millimeter Ababil-100. The range goals cited for this system vary from over 400 kilometers up to 1,000 kilometers, depending on the source and the payload mass....
....Some conclusions
I have covered a lot of ground today, much of it highly technical. Although we are resisting drawing conclusions in this first interim report, a number of things have become clearer already as a result of our investigation, among them:
1. Saddam, at least as judged by those scientists and other insiders who worked in his military-industrial programs, had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even those senior officials we have interviewed who claim no direct knowledge of any ongoing prohibited activities readily acknowledge that Saddam intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.
2. In the delivery systems area there were already well advanced, but undeclared, ongoing activities that, if OIF had not intervened, would have resulted in the production of missiles with ranges at least up to 1,000 kilometers, well in excess of the U.N. permitted range of 150 kilometers. These missile activities were supported by a serious clandestine procurement program about which we have much still to learn.
3. In the chemical and biological weapons area we have confidence that there were at a minimum clandestine ongoing research and development activities that were embedded in the Iraqi Intelligence Service. While we have much yet to learn about the exact work programs and capabilities of these activities, it is already apparent that these undeclared activities would have at a minimum facilitated chemical and biological weapons activities and provided a technically trained cadre.
Let me conclude by returning to something I began with today. We face a unique but challenging opportunity in our efforts to unravel the exact status of Iraq's WMD program. The good news is that we do not have to rely for the first time in over a decade on the incomplete, and often false, data that Iraq supplied the U.N./IAEA; data collected by U.N. inspectors operating with the severe constraints that Iraqi security and deception actions imposed; information supplied by defectors, some of whom certainly fabricated much that they supplied and perhaps were under the direct control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service; data collected by national technical collections systems with their own limitations. The bad news is that we have to do this under conditions that ensure that our work will take time and impose serious physical dangers on those who are asked to carry it out.
Why should we take the time and run the risk to ensure that our conclusions reflect the truth to the maximum extent that is possible given the conditions in post-conflict Iraq? For those of us that are carrying out this search, there are two reasons that drive us to want to complete this effort.
First, whatever we find will probably differ from prewar intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information. It is, however, only by understanding precisely what those difference are that the quality of future intelligence and investment decisions concerning future intelligence systems can be improved. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is such a continuing threat to global society that learning those lessons has a high imperative.
Second, we have found people, technical information and illicit procurement networks that if allowed to flow to other countries and regions could accelerate global proliferation. Even in the area of actual weapons there is no doubt that Iraq had at one time chemical and biological weapons. Even if there were only a remote possibility that these pre-1991 weapons still exist, we have an obligation to American troops who are now there and the Iraqi population to ensure that none of these remain to be used against them in the ongoing insurgency activity.
Mr. Chairman and members, I appreciate this opportunity to share with you the initial results of the first three months of the activities of the Iraqi Survey Group. I am certain that I speak for Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, who commands the Iraqi Survey Group, when I say how proud we are of the men and women from across the government and from our coalition partners, Australia and the United Kingdom, who have gone to Iraq and are carrying out this important mission.
Thank you.
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