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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (14625)	4/26/2005 3:55:26 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361428

U.S. study: Iraq likely didn't ship WMD to Syria WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It is unlikely Iraq shipped banned weapons material into Syria before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to report released by the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA/Pentagon team searching for Iraqi weapons programs. In October, the group said that the 1991 Persian Gulf War likely destroyed Iraq's capabilities of producing weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had none when the United States invaded. (Full story) After the October report, Vice President Dick Cheney and other U.S. officials said they believed Iraq possessed such material before the war and had moved it across the border into Syria, where the weapons may have been transferred to terrorists. Addenda to the group's final report -- released Monday on the U.S. Government Printing Office's Web site -- threw doubt on that scenario. "ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place," the report said. The group also said it had been unable to complete its investigation because of security concerns and couldn't rule out an "unofficial" transfer of material. The report said that 12 years of international sanctions against Baghdad after the Gulf War had left Iraq's scientific community decimated and these experts' skills in a state of "natural decay." The group added it was unlikely that scientists were capable of re-creating the destroyed weapons programs, meaning Iraq would have possessed little, if anything, to transfer. "It is worth noting that even if ISG had been able to fully examine all the leads it possessed, it is unlikely that conclusive information would have been found," the report said. Instead, the report said, detainees interviewed by the group "uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria." Charles Duefler, head of the Iraq Survey Group, recommended that many of the detained scientists could be released because they had been cooperative, were no longer a security risk and had no more information to share.