Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month

Washington Post ^ | January 12, 2005 | Dafna Linzer

[Sunshine55]

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

[Wolfstar]

Grin...thanks for the photo of Miss B. One I've already seen, of course, but then I'll never get tired of them.

[My2Cents]

Scott McClellan and the other press handlers should frame the Q&A sessions on their terms, not the media's.

Precisely. This was the greatest mystery of the '04 campaign -- why Bush didn't competently fight back against his detractors on this very issue. My only suspicion is that the Administration knows what happened to Saddam's WMDs (shipped to Syria, Sudan, Libya, perhaps Iran), and they know it's only a matter of time before all of this gets released, and they're vindicated.

In the meantime, whenever some press dope questions McClellan or Rumsfeld, or any other Administration official about the lack of WMDs, they should simply respond, "Well, where do you think Saddam's weapons went to? We know he had them; the UN inventoried many of them. Where did they go?...That's still being pursued."

[BillF]

There were 53 WMDs found in Iraq since May of 2004 and referred to in the Duelfer (Iraq Survey Group) Report issued last September.

Below is a map of Iraqi locations where WMDs were found. This is a map from the Duelfer Report as published on the CIA web site.

I understand that the Dems and their willing accomplices of the liberal media want to ignore these findings.

It is beyond me why President Bush and the administration have let themselves be put on the defensive over false assertions that no WMDs were found in Iraq.

President Bush, with his administration backing this line, should say, pointing to the below map:

The WMDs found in Iraq at the locations on this map were direct threats to America and all civilized countries. These weapons, kept in Iraq as Saddam continued to violate its ceasefire with us and 17 UN resolutions, required strong action by us.

The brave American and coalition forces took that strong action, liberating Iraq from a ruthless, mass-murdering dictator who had kept that country in bondage for decades.

Although it's true that the chemical WMDs found in Iraq were apparently made prior to 1991 and there were not as many WMDs as we, our allies, and our intelligence agencies believed, these weapons could easily have been used to murder innocent Americans in a terrorist attack.

Five (5) Americans were murdered, 13 others were infected, and major disruptions of our Congress and Postal Service resulted from a relatively small amount of anthrax mailed by an as-yet-unknown person or persons.

I don't think that the American people wanted Saddam to get away with flouting the ceasefire and the UN resolutions, keeping his WMDs, and continuing to pose a threat. We've found more WMDs in Iraq than were involved in the anthrax attacks. I wasn't about to trust that Saddam would not use the WMDs and would not transfer the WMDs to his terrorist allies.

Below is Figure 5, on page 30 of volume 3 (click here to go directly to map on CIA web site). You can click here to go to the index of the report.

[Peach]

Thanks so much for that map and reply, Bill. And thank you for contributing to the thread.

[My2Cents]

Bump