WMD: Blair was right

A TERRIFYING new probe yesterday revealed Saddam Hussein WAS secretly preparing for chemical, biological and even nuclear war.

The 13-page document, compiled from the reports of 1,200 arms experts who have been scouring Iraq for two months, says Saddam was determined to resume building nukes.

And he was already negotiating with rogue state North Korea to buy long-range rockets that could have launched nuclear AND chemical warheads at UK bases in the Med.

The experts also unearthed secret bio-weapons labs, new strains of lethal diseases, a deadly bug hidden in a scientist’s home — and evidence of possible chemical weapon tests on human victims.

The report, from America’s Iraq Survey Group, totally vindicates Tony Blair’s decision to go to war over WMDs.

ISG chief Dr David Kay says in the report: “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related programme activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the UN.”

Dr Kay’s full report — revealed to US congressmen yesterday — is still top secret.

Vindicated ... Tony Blair But last night Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: “It has produced conclusive and incontrovertible evidence that Iraq was in material breach of UN Resolution 1441.”

In his report, Dr Kay admits no actual weapons of mass destruction have yet been found.

But he points out that his experts from America, Britain and Australia have faced a campaign of sabotage, looting, and obstruction — and have been subjected to bombings, firefights and threats.

Nevertheless, they have proved Saddam was planning to acquire long-range missiles, possibly nuclear-tipped.

These missiles could have hit UK bases in Cyprus, Turkey and Cairo — as The Sun revealed in September.

Dr Kay says: “There were plans and advanced design work for new long range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000km — well beyond the 150km limit set by the UN.”

The experts found evidence of “clandestine attempts” between late 1999 and 2002 to get from North Korea technology related to its 1300km No Dong missiles.

Saddam ... making secret plans Chillingly, they also unearthed documents and equipment concealed in scientists’ homes for “resuming uranium enrichment” — a key stage in the making of nukes.

And Iraqi scientists interviewed by the ISG team confirmed Saddam was determined to develop them.

Dr Kay, a former UN weapons inspector credited with dismantling Saddam’s nuclear programme in the 1990s, says: “They have told us Saddam remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons.

“At least one senior Iraqi official believed, by 2000, Saddam had run out of patience with waiting for sanctions to end and wanted to restart the nuclear programme.”

ISG experts found a vial of “live” botulism hidden in an Iraqi scientist’s home — and fear others are still at large.

Dr Kay’s report says: “The scientist who concealed the vial has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. The group is searching for the second cache. One ex-biological weapons scientist confirmed a production line could be switched to produce anthrax in a week.”

The report also highlights a “network of labs and safehouses” containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research.

And it found evidence of a “prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of biological weapon agents” — again explicitly concealed from the UN.

The experts also uncovered “new research” on deadly viruses Brucella, Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever, ricin and aflatoxin.

Warning ... Sun, Sept 2002 The report says other members of the team discovered a “covert capability” to make fuel propellant useful ONLY for banned Scud missiles. Dr Kay says the hunt was hampered by Iraqi obstruction, secrecy and sabotage.

He adds: “Looting destroyed important evidence of Iraq’s WMD programme. This was deliberate. Some personnel crossed borders before and during the conflict and may have taken evidence and weapons-related material.

“Even the bulkiest materials we are searching for can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage.”

Dr Kay said that the ISG team also had the monumental task of examining Iraq’s huge conventional weapons caches. So far only ten of 130 have been rigorously searched.

He said the nuclear programme appeared to be in its early stages, adding: “The evidence we found will suggest a very tentative restart at the very most rudimentary level.”

Downing Street last night hailed Dr Kay’s interim report as dramatic evidence of Saddam’s lies.

And a top security source said last night: “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Last night the Ministry of Defence said the vial of botulism found in the Iraqi scientist’s home could have been “weaponised” within 48 hours.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dithering UN did not want to know Commentary by TREVOR KAVANAGH

WHAT is most surprising about the damning new evidence against Saddam Hussein is that it should come as a surprise at all.

There was ample proof long before America and Britain went to war that Saddam was spoiling for a fight. The dithering UN just didn’t want to know.

What must shock even those like French President Jacques Chirac, who led the crusade to stop us invading, is his terrifying pursuit of nukes.

Dr David Kay’s report, certain to be howled down by the conspiracy-obsessed anti-war brigade, does more than justify ousting Saddam.

It proves beyond doubt that it was a virtuous act for which the world should be truly grateful.

WMD proof ... David Kay We now know this tyrant had “run out of patience” and was determined to make Iraq the Arab world’s nuclear power. Uranium enrichment was planned and a supply of ballistic missiles capable of delivering warheads as far away as Cairo, Turkey — and Israel — was being teed-up with North Korea.

Iraq and North Korea are countries controversially but correctly identified by President George Bush as the “Axis of Evil”.

That axis includes Iran which is now trying to build nuclear power stations and has warned it might one day use nukes against Israel.

Saudi Arabia is slyly trying to obtain nukes from Pakistan. Egypt wants a nuclear powered desalination plant. The risk of anti-Western regimes going nuclear is too horrifying to contemplate.

That risk has been substantially reduced by the salutary demonstration of America’s — and Britain’s — display of resolution and military might.

Left to the tender care of the limp-wristed UN, Saddam would have continued to develop WMDs.

And one day, without a shadow of a doubt, he would have used them — to devastating effect on world peace.

Here is Andrew Sullivan's article on David Kay's report to Congress re the grim realities of $oddomite's WMD program:

Andrew Sullivan: READ THE (WMD) REPORT
andrewsullivan.com ^ | 10/03/03 | Andrew Sullivan

Posted on 10/02/2003 9:33 PM PDT by Pokey78

If you think that David Kay's report on Iraqi WMDs can be adequately summarized by idiotic headlines such as: "No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq," then you need to read this report. If you believe the following "news analysis" by David Sanger in today's New York Times summarizes the findings of David Kay, then you need to read this report. Sanger's piece is, in fact, political propaganda disguised as analysis, designed to obscure and distort the evidence that you can read with your own eyes. His opening paragraph culminates in a simple, knowing, well-crafted lie:

The preliminary report delivered on Thursday by the chief arms inspector in Iraq forces the Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that Saddam Hussein's armory appears to have been stuffed with precursors, potential weapons and bluffs, but that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Mr. Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world.
That is not what the administration claimed. (The Times has even had to run a correction recently correcting their attempt, retroactively, to distort and misrepresent the administration's position.) The administration claimed that Saddam had used WMDs in the past, had hidden materials from the United Nations, was hiding a continued program for weapons of mass destruction, and that we should act before the threat was imminent. The argument was that it was impossible to restrain Saddam Hussein unless he were removed from power and disarmed. The war was based on the premise that Saddam had clearly violated U.N. resolutions, was in open breach of such resolutions and was continuing to conceal his programs with the intent of restarting them in earnest once sanctions were lifted. Having read the report carefully, I'd say that the administration is vindicated in every single respect of that argument. This war wasn't just moral; it wasn't just prudent; it was justified on the very terms the administration laid out. And we don't know the half of it yet.

THE MONEY QUOTES: If you don't have time, here are my highlights. First off:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
Translation: Saddam was lying to the U.N. as late as 2002. He was required by the U.N. to fully cooperate. He didn't. The war was justified on those grounds alone. Case closed. Some of the physical evidence still remains, despite what was clearly a deliberate, coordinated and thorough attempt to destroy evidence before during and after the war. Among the discoveries:
* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

* A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

* Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

* New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

* Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

* A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

* Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

* Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

* Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.
Would you be happy, after 9/11, if the president had allowed such capabilities to remain at large, and be reinvigorated, with French and Russian help, after sanctions were removed? I wouldn't. But the New York Times and Dominique de Villepin would have happily looked the other way rather than do anything real to enforce the very resolutions they claimed to support.

THERE'S MORE: One of the crazy premises of the "Where Are They?" crowd is that we would walk into that huge country and find large piles of Acme bombs with anthrax in them. That's not what a WMD program is about; and never was. Saddam was careful. He had to hide from the U.N. and he had to find ways, over more than a decade, to maintain a WMD program as best he could, ready to reactivate whenever the climate altered in his favor. Everything points to such a strategy and to such weapons being maintained. The bio-warfare stuff is particularly worrying:

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information - including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.
Mustard gas in a matter of months. And concealment all the time:
A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery - hidden in the home of a BW scientist - illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.
When you read this kind of information, you can see why the president has ordered more money to go to this effort. We need every cent. We have to show to the world - and to the appeasers at home - the extent of the threat that this monstrous regime potentially represented.

FOR THE FUTURE: But Kay makes a more important point at the end. He notes that our ability to examine this entire edifice in a liberated Iraq, to see where our intelligence failed and where it succeeded, is a hugely helpful task in the broader war on terror. Over to Kay:

[W]hatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information. It is, however, only by understanding precisely what those differences are that the quality of future intelligence and investment decisions concerning future intelligence systems can be improved. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is such a continuing threat to global society that learning those lessons has a high imperative.
Of course it has. I've waited a long time for this report, and kept my peace until it came out and we had some empirical data to measure. What we now see may not impress those who are looking for any way to discredit this administration and this war. But it shows to my mind the real danger that Saddam posed - and would still pose today, if one president and one prime minister hadn't had the fortitude to face him down. We live in a dangerous but still safer world because of it. Now is the time for the administration to stop the internal quibbling, the silence and passivity, and go back on the offensive. Show the dangers that the opposition was happy for us to tolerate; show the threat - real and potential - that this war averted; defend the record with pride and vigor; and fund the reconstruction in ways that will make it work now not just for our sake but for the sake of those once killed in large numbers by the weapons some are so eager not to find.

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