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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (606769)	4/6/2011 4:45:56 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577987

Here..you read it....a--hole en.wikipedia.org "On 30 September 2004, the ISG released the Duelfer Report, its final report on Iraq's purported WMD programs. Among its conclusions were: * Saddam Hussein controlled all of the regime’s strategic decision making. * Hussein's primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the regime. * The introduction of the Oil-for-food program (OFF) in late 1996 was a key turning point for the regime. * By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support. * Iran was Iraq's pre-eminent motivator. * The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) judged that events in the 1980s and early 1990s shaped Saddam’s belief in the value of WMD. * Saddam ended his nuclear program in 1991. ISG found no evidence of concerted efforts to restart the program, and Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after 1991. * Iraq destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in 1991, and only a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions were discovered by the ISG. * Saddam's regime abandoned its biological weapons program and its ambition to obtain advanced biological weapons in 1995. While it could have re-established an elementary BW program within weeks, ISG discovered no indications it was pursuing such a course. * Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability, which was essentially destroyed in 1991, after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities. en.wikipedia.org "David Kay resigns" On 23 January 2004, the head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMD stockpiles would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties." In a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay criticized the pre-war WMD intelligence and the agencies that produced it, saying "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing." [1] Sometime earlier, CIA director George Tenet had asked David Kay to delay his departure: "If you resign now, it will appear that we don't know what we're doing. That the wheels are coming off."[1] Kay told the SASC during his oral report the following, though: "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion-—although I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war." Kay's team established that the Iraqi regime had the production capacity and know-how to produce chemical and biological weaponry if international economic sanctions were lifted, a policy change which was actively being sought by a number of United Nations member states. Kay also believed some components of the former Iraqi regime's WMD program had been moved to Syria shortly before the 2003 invasion [2], though the Duelfer Report Addenda (see below) later reported there was no evidence of this. On 6 February 2004, George W. Bush convened the Iraq Intelligence Commission, an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war and the failure to find WMD. This was shortly followed by the conclusion of a similar inquiry in the United Kingdom, the Butler Review, which was boycotted by the two main opposition parties due to disagreements on its scope and independence [3]. In 2003, the US-sponsored search for WMD had been budgeted for $400 million, with an additional $600 million added in 2004. Kay's successor, named by CIA director George Tenet, was the former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who stated at the time that the chances of finding any WMD stockpiles in Iraq were "close to nil." "Inspector Faults Prewar Intelligence By PHILIP SHENON David Kay, former Bush administration official who led fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, tells Congress that National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice botched intelligence information about Iraq's weapons program before war; his remarks reflect widespread view among intelligence specialists that Rice and National Security Council have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before 9/11 terrorist attacks and Iraq war; Kay say... August 19, 2004