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To: mistermj who wrote (58843)	10/6/2004 5:19:31 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

IRAQ HAD NO WMDs - inspectors Mark Oliver Wednesday October 6, 2004 The Guardian The group searching for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction publishes its final findings tonight and is expected to say it found no evidence of any illegal stockpiles. Charles Duelfer, the head of the US-led team that spent 15-months searching for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, will deliver the Iraq Survey Group (ISG)'s final report to the US senate at around 1930BST. US officials cited by the Washington Post today said that the 1,000-page document concludes that Saddam Hussein had the desire but not the capability to create weapons that could attack the west. A leak of a draft of the report earlier this month said Saddam planned to rebuild his WMD capability had UN sanctions been lifted. Critics of US and British policy towards Iraq will hope to use the ISG report as evidence that the policy of containment was working, while the White House and Downing Street will hope that the report draws a line under the politically damaging issue. The prime minister, Tony Blair, appealed for the "fullness" of the ISG report to be analysed, rather than only one aspect of it. Mr Blair, who is in Sudan on the first leg of a three-day Africa visit, was asked whether he would now go back to the Commons to correct any misleading impression about WMDs that he had given to MPs in the run-up to war. "I think we have already been through this. I will say some more about it when the report is actually published. I hope what's actually published is the fullness of the ISG report and not simply one aspect of it," the prime minister told reporters. Speaking in Baghdad, the foreign secretray, Jack Straw, said that the report shows that the threat from Saddam "in terms of his intentions ... [was] even starker than we have seen before". Both George Bush and Tony Blair used allegations of WMD as a prime justification for last year's invasion of Iraq and officials are unlikely to be relishing the publication of the ISG's final findings. Mr Bush has argued that it stopped a long-term risk posed by Saddam and insisted during his campaign for re-election that Iraq had been a "gathering" threat. But the leaked draft - obtained by the New York Times - said that the only biological or chemical weapons Saddam's regime was working on before last year's invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations. The draft does not rule out the possibility that WMD stockpiles could have been moved out of Iraq but there is apparently no evidence to suggest this. Earlier this year Mr Duelfer told the Guardian he expected the final report would leave some unanswered questions. The failure to find stockpiles of WMD had been anticipated since the former head of the ISG, David Kay, quit in January. "We were almost all wrong" in thinking Saddam had stocks of such weapons, he said. At the Labour party conference last week Mr Blair urged his party to put aside its differences over Iraq and focus on winning a third term in power. Mr Blair told the conference he accepted that the evidence about Saddam having "actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong". "I simply point out such evidence was agreed by the whole international community, not least because Saddam had used such weapons against his own people and neighbouring countries," he said. "And the problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam. The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power." Today the shadow defence secretary, Nicholas Soames, said it would be "no great surprise" if the ISG reported that no evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons had been found. "I don't think it alters the case for war one way or another personally, but I think it is difficult for the Americans and for the prime minister to explain," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

To: mistermj who wrote (58843)	10/6/2004 5:21:37 PM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 89467

U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03 By DOUGLAS JEHL ASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — Iraq now appears to have destroyed its stockpiles of illicit weapons within months of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and by the time of the American invasion in spring 2003, its capacity to produce such weapons was continuing to erode, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a report made public today. The report by Charles A. Duelfer said the last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. The finding amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators has concluded were the facts on the ground. At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them. The White House had portrayed the war as a bid to disarm Iraq of unconventional weapons, and had invoked images of mushroom clouds, deadly gases and fearsome poisons. But Mr. Duelfer concluded that even if Iraq had sought to restart its weapons programs in 2003, it could not have produced significant quantities of chemical weapons for at least a year, and would have required years to produce a nuclear weapon. "Over time he was getting further away from nuclear weapons," an official familiar with the report said of Saddam Hussein in advance of the public release of Mr. Duelfer's report. "He was further away in 2003 than he was in 1991. The nuclear program was decaying rather than being preserved." Mr. Duelfer presented his conclusions to Congress today, beginning with a closed-testimony session before the Senate Intelligence Committee. But his findings were described to reporters in advance of the testimony, although only on condition that they not to be published until an afternoon appearance by Mr. Duelfer before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when the report was made public. The three-volume report, totaling more than 900 pages, is viewed as the first authoritative attempt to unravel the mystery posed by Iraq during the crucial years between the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the American-led war that began in 2003. It adds new weight to what is already a widely accepted view that the most fundamental prewar assertions made by American intelligence agencies about Iraq — that it possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program — bore no resemblance to the truth. Mr. Duelfer concluded that Mr. Hussein made fundamental decisions, beginning in 1991, to get rid of Iraq's illicit weapons and accept the destruction of its weapons-producing facilities as part of an effort to win an end to United Nations sanctions. But Mr. Duelfer argued that Mr. Hussein was also exploiting avenues opened by the sanctions, including the oil-for-food program, to lay the groundwork for a long-term plan to resume weapons production if sanctions were lifted. "It was clearly Saddam Hussein's intention to restart his W.M.D. activities when the opportunity arose to do so," the official familiar with the report said of Mr. Duelfer's findings, using an abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. But that conclusion, the official acknowledged, was based more on inference than solid evidence. Mr. Duelfer did not find concrete evidence of such a plan, the official said, though he argued that the nature of the Iraqi regime had made it extraordinary unlikely that such a blueprint would have been committed to paper. The report was based in part on the interrogation of Mr. Hussein in his prison cell outside Baghdad. Mr. Duelfer said he had concluded that Mr. Hussein had deliberately sought to maintain an ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons in a strategy aimed as much at Iran, with whom Iraq fought an eight-year war in the 1990's, as at the United States. Mr. Duelfer's report said that American investigators had found clandestine laboratories used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service to produce small quantities of ricin, a poison made from castor beans. It said those laboratories were active at the time of the American invasion in 2003. But as was previously reported, the Duelfer inquiry concluded that those laboratories appeared intended for use in developing agents for use in assassinations, not to inflict mass casualties. Mr. Duelfer said in his report that Mr. Hussein never acknowledged in the course of the interrogations what had become of Iraq's illicit weapons. He said that American investigators had appealed to the former Iraqi leader to be candid in order to shape his legacy, but that Mr. Hussein had not been forthcoming. The official familiar with the report said that interviews with other former top Iraqi leaders had made clear that Mr. Hussein had left many of his top deputies uncertain until the eve of war about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. The official said that Mr. Hussein seemed to fear a new attack by Iran, whose incursions into Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 were fended off by Baghdad only with the use of chemical munitions fired on ballistic missiles. Mr. Duelfer said in the report that Iraq took conscious effort to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said that Iraq had essentially put its biological program "on the shelf" after its last production facility was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in 1996, and could have begun to produce biological questions in as little as a month if it had restarted its weapons program in 1996. The report will almost certainly be the last complete assessment by the team led by Mr. Duelfer, which is known as the Iraq Survey Group. But Mr. Duelfer said that he and the 1,200-member team would continue their work in Iraq for the time being. He said that the team had not completely ruled out the possibility that some Iraqi weapons might have been smuggled out of Iraq to a neighboring country, such as Syria.