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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (125525)	3/3/2004 12:05:49 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 281500

U.N.: Iraq had no WMD after 1994 Tue Mar 2, 7:28 AM ET By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq (news - web sites) after 1994, according to two U.N. diplomats who have seen the document. The historical review of inspections in Iraq is the first outside study to confirm the recent conclusion by David Kay, the former U.S. chief inspector, that Iraq had no banned weapons before last year's U.S-led invasion. It also goes further than prewar U.N. reports, which said no weapons had been found but noted that Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War (news - web sites) in 1991. The report, to be outlined to the U.N. Security Council as early as Friday, is based on information gathered over more than seven years of U.N. inspections in Iraq before the 2003 war, plus postwar findings discussed publicly by Kay. Kay reported in October that his team found "dozens of WMD-related program activities" that Iraq was required to reveal to U.N. inspectors but did not. However, he said he found no actual WMDs. The study, a quarterly report on Iraq from U.N. inspectors, notes that the U.S. teams' inability to find any weapons after the war mirrors the experience of U.N. inspectors who searched there from November 2002 until March 2003. Many Bush administration officials were harshly critical of the U.N. inspection efforts in the months before the war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in August 2002 that inspections "will be a sham." The Bush administration also pointedly declined U.N. offers to help in the postwar weapons hunt, preferring instead to use U.S. inspectors and specialists from other coalition countries such as Britain and Australia. But U.N. reports submitted to the Security Council before the war by Hans Blix, former chief U.N. arms inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, have been largely validated by U.S. weapons teams. The common findings: Iraq's nuclear weapons program was dormant. No evidence was found to suggest Iraq possessed chemical or biological weapons. U.N. officials believe the weapons were destroyed by U.N. inspectors or Iraqi officials in the years after the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq was attempting to develop missiles capable of exceeding a U.N.-mandated limit of 93 miles. Demetrius Perricos, the acting executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, said in an interview that the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq since the war undercuts administration criticism of the U.N.'s search before the war. "You cannot say that only the Americans or the British or the Australians currently inspecting in Iraq are the clever inspectors - and the Americans and the British and the Australians that we had were not," he said. story.news.yahoo.com

To: Bilow who wrote (125525)	3/3/2004 2:12:47 AM
From: Elsewhere	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Admit WMD mistake, survey chief [Kay] tells Bush Julian Borger in Washington Wednesday March 3, 2004 The Guardian guardian.co.uk David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons. In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad. He welcomed the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq, and said the wide-ranging US investigation was much more likely to get to the truth than the Butler inquiry in Britain. That, he noted, had "so many limitations it's going to be almost impossible" to come to meaningful conclusions. Mr Kay, 63, a former nuclear weapons inspector, provoked uproar at the end of January when he told the Senate that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). He also resigned from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which he was appointed by the CIA to lead in the hunt for weapons stockpiles, saying its resources had been diverted in the fight against Iraqi insurgents. "I was more worried that we were still sending teams out to search for things that we were increasingly convinced were not there," Mr Kay said. His call for a frank admission is an embarrassment for the White House at the start of an election year. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has dismissed Mr Kay's assertion that there were no WMD at the start of the Iraq war as a "theory" that was "possible, but not likely". In his state of the union speech in January, George Bush did not refer to his prewar claims that Iraq was an "immediate threat" but instead said the ISG had found "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities". Mr Kay, who was formerly a UN weapons inspector, called for the president to go further. "It's about confronting and coming clean with the American people. He should say we were mistaken and I am determined to find out why," he said. A White House official said it was too early to draw conclusions: "The ISG is still working, and the commission on this has not even started." However, Mr Kay said that continued evasion would create public cynicism about the administration's motives, which he believes reflected a genuine fear of WMD falling into the hands of terrorists. He also said that if the administration did not confront the Iraq intelligence fiasco head-on it would undermine its credibility with its allies in future crises "for a generation". Mr Kay said that he had become convinced there were no WMD to be found several months ago, before presenting an interim report to Congress last October saying no stockpiles had been found, but he said the CIA and the Blair government were nervous about the impact of his conclusions. "I think the greatest concern about the report was in London rather than in Washington. It was a different political issue in London than it was here," he said, referring to the storm around the death of his former UN colleague David Kelly. Mr Kay said he had been expecting Dr Kelly's arrival in Iraq to help the search for biological weapons programmes, and had spoken to him shortly before his death. "He never had any doubts about Iraq's programmes," Mr Kay said.