Posted on 09/24/2003 7:32:16 AM PDT by areafiftyone
No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group tasked with looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC's Daily Politics. The programme's presenter Andrew Neil says this is the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group's interim report, due to be published next month.
Mr Neil said the report is also set to say it was highly unlikely that weapons were shipped out of the country before the US-led war on Iraq.
He said it will also claim that Saddam Hussein mounted a huge programme to deceive and hinder the work of US weapons inspectors.
Mr Neil, a former editor of the Sunday Times, stressed the Daily Politics had not seen the draft report, and was reporting what a single source had said its findings were likely to be. The bottom line is that the team has found no weapons of mass destruction
Former Tory Cabinet minister Michael Portillo said if these details of the report were true, it would be a "savage blow" to the prime minister.
But Downing Street and the CIA have refused to comment until the report is published.
The Iraq Survey Group took over the job of finding WMD from the US military in June.
The ISG is a largely US operation - headed by a US general although it includes some British and Australian staff.
Its 1,400 personnel are made up of many former UN weapons inspectors and its work is shrouded in secrecy.
'Under pressure'
Its focus is intelligence, using documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists to build up a picture of the secret world of Iraq's weapons programmes.
The Iraq Survey Group has been under a good deal of pressure to prove the Bush administration's case that Iraq's weapons posed a significant threat.
Gary Samor, of the international institute for strategic studies in London told the BBC that "it would have been far better to have asked the UN inspection teams back into Iraq after the war to complete their work".
"Their ranks could have been bolstered in any number of ways."
In his view, whatever the Iraq Survey Group comes up with, their evidence is going to have to contend with a huge degree of international scepticism.
Last week some intruiging information came out of Swiss banking circles. Saddam Hussein had lied about two things.
First, he lied about his weapons of mass destruction. He had gotten rid of them after the Gulf War I, but had lied about their existence to intimidate Israel and Iran -- and anybody else who wanted to believe his lies. That included us.
Second, he lied about his oil reserves. Iraq's reserves are less than half of what he said, and what the world thought. The wells are coming to the end of their useful lives and are spewing out large amounts of salt water. To use an oil man's expression, "Iraq's oil is on the other side of Hubbert's Peak." This means that Iraq's wells are on the downslope of the production curve.
While the first lie will now cause terrible political repercussions for Bush, it is the second lie that will cause the economic problems.
There are trillions of dollars (notional value) of derivatives out there based on oil price spreads. If this story gets out, world oil prices will skyrocket and trigger a derivative "neutron bomb" that will destabilize the world financial system. A lot of big players are exposed in this, and that is why the wraps are being kept on the story.
Yes! Exactly. I was heartened when Bush did not back off the WMD charge before the UN GenAssem. Howard Dean and most of the other dwarves will take a fall when the evidence is presented. Perhaps Dean will be the nominee at that time. Even Bill Klinton warned them.
I don't think Wolfowitz was lying when he referred to the amount of oil revenue that would be generated in Iraq, he was just snookered. We will be lucky to pump out enough oil in Iraq in one year, to pay for a month of the war. It is that grim. With the rest of the world unwilling to send money, or troops other than the coalition in place, we are going to be holding the bag.
Oil futures jumped over $1 today. Prices are going to go back up at the pumps, making the economy suffer as a result. I just hope that we can find a way out of Iraq with our credibility and our checkbook still salvagable.
Yes, and that's because OPEC has the same information as the Swiss bankers. They may even have been the source of the info. They have us by the short-and-curlies, and now they are squeezing.
I don't think Wolfowitz was lying when he referred to the amount of oil revenue that would be generated in Iraq, he was just snookered. We will be lucky to pump out enough oil in Iraq in one year, to pay for a month of the war. It is that grim.
We were all snookered. Saddam, even after we find him and kill him, is going to have the last laugh.
With the rest of the world unwilling to send money, or troops other than the coalition in place, we are going to be holding the bag.
We can't afford to stay, but we can't afford to leave either.
Oil futures jumped over $1 today. Prices are going to go back up at the pumps, making the economy suffer as a result. I just hope that we can find a way out of Iraq with our credibility and our checkbook still salvagable.
That's why Bush is going to the UN. This one has gotten too big for us. We need them to shoulder much of the burden.
How about we wait for Kay's report?
Actually, Blix agreed that Saddam effectively framed himself.
Hans Blix says it may all have been one big bluff by Iraq. The former chief U-N weapons inspector tells an Australian radio station he believes Iraq destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction ten years ago -- just as Iraq had claimed. But he says Baghdad may have kept up the appearance it still had the weapons -- to deter a military attack. In his words -- quote -- "you can put up a sign on your door 'Beware of Dog,' without having a dog."
Peace is war and war is peace eh? Perhaps Blix's name will soon appear on the pro-war freeper honor role! Being a pro-war freeper seems never having to admit that you were wrong.
You know comparing the tooth fairy to a brutal dictator(saddam) who used chemical weapons in the recent past, gives a new twist to the adage comparing apples to oranges.
Actually the oil fields aren't "tapped out". The infrastructure is "tapped out", due to saddams previous neglect and sporadic sabotage.
I may need to go back and double-check this, but I'm pretty certain that Bill Clinton left office in 2001.
No, Blix made the "Beware of dog" claim recently, not before the war, so I imply no prescience with my quote.
I do not have much respect for Hans Blix. I was replying to the comment "Perhaps some freepers owe an apology to Hans Blix who, unlike them, was apparently right on the money about WMD." Perhaps you remember the comment, since you made it.
Blix's claim that Saddam has probably not had WMDs for 10 years also came in the last few weeks (same interview as the "Dog" quote), so it is absurd to say he was "right on the money," at least, unless you can find an unambiguous Blix quote preceding the war.
In short, I stand by my position, that if anti-Bush or anti-war debaters illogically use the Blix interview to discredit Bush (illogical because the worst one can take from the interview is that Bush, like Blix, was not omniscient), then it is a reasonable response to point out what else Blix said in the same interview (i.e., that Saddam probably framed himself).
First, he certainly lied and kept weapons more recently than 10 years ago; he was about to get a clean bill of health from the inspectors in 1995, until his sons-in-law defected to Jordan and spilled the beans. Given that history (and the absence of people willing to cross Saddam after he had his sons-in-law executed), it was natural that any inspection regime would be apt to be skeptical in the face of ambiguous information.
Despite this, Iraq obstructed inspectors, delayed inspections, refused to update the documents presented last year from those presented years earlier, and frightened scientists into not talking to the inspectors. In short, Iraq acted guilty, as even the favorite source for the Iraq apologists, Hans Blix, stated recently.
Thank you, exactly. He didn't want to lose face among the other Middle Eastern nations. And all it's going to end up taking to prove it to the faithful in the war party is the about half a trillion dollars in US taxpayer money. Oh that and hundreds of brave men and women in the Armed Forces.
I think after this fiasco the party of FDR/Wilson needs to be put to bed once and for all.
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