Free Republic

MIAMI - Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) asserted on Thursday that a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites), who found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines President Bush (news - web sites)'s decision to go to war. The report shows that "delay, defer, wasn't an option," Cheney told a town-hall style meeting. While Democrats seized on the new report by Charles Duelfer to bolster their case that invading Iraq was a mistake, Cheney focused on portions of the report that were...

Is it really true that Saddam Hussein had no "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invaded in March 2003? Not exactly - at least not if one counts the 500 tons of uranium that the Iraqi dictator kept stored at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant. The press hasn't made much of Saddam's 500-ton uranium stockpile, downplaying the story to such an extent that most Americans aren't even aware of it. But it's been reported - albeit in a by-the-way fashion - by the New York Times and a handful of other media outlets. And one...

As Israel considers allowing Egypt to control the critical Philadelphi corridor along Israel’s border, startling revelations about Egyptian chemical weapons proliferation are coming to light. Egypt secretly helped former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his chemical weapons program, according to a CIA report. The report, authored by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, says that Egypt sent specialists to Iraq in the 1980s to help him manufacture poison gas. Iraq later used the gas against Iranian citizens as well as Iraqi Kurds. The report says that the Iraqi government paid Egypt $12 million, "in return for assistance with production and storage...

NEW YORK — The scandal engulfing the United Nations Procurement Department () now appears to be bottomless. It also shows signs of growing more sinister, especially where it involves a mysterious private company called IHC Services (), which did big business with the procurement department until it was removed from U.N. rosters in June. New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam...

The CIA's chief weapons inspector said he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria before the March 2003 invasion, citing "sufficiently credible" evidence that WMDs may have been moved there. Inspector Charles Duelfer, who heads the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), made the findings in an addendum to his final report filed last year. He said the search for WMD in Iraq -- the main reason President Bush went to war to oust Saddam Hussein -- has been exhausted without finding such weapons. Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery...

The Washington Post yesterday said a quotation used in its lead Page One headline in Thursday's paper -- that the United States got it "almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- was not new and was incorrectly attributed to the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. In an article on Thursday, The Post identified Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration picked to complete a U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, as the source of that remark. The dispatch by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reported that Mr. Duelfer, chairman of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group,...

The hunt for WMD's in Iraq is finally over, and basically we didn't find anything. Yes, the Poles found a bunch of old binary shells filled with Sarin, but I can't believe that was all that Saddam had. Saddam was a ruthless, paranoid bastard who didn't make threats he couldn't back up. Even our buddy the Swedish inspector Hans Blix wrote a memo just before the start of the war about the status of 10,000 liters of anthrax. Nancy Pelosi, the ranking communist from Northern California quipped "(Bush) needs to explain to the American people why he was so wrong,...

US official leading Iraq WMD hunt narrowly escapes suicide bombing: report Posted: Tuesday November 9,2004 - 04:33:48 pm WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US official leading Washington's hunt for Iraq 's supposed weapons of mass destruction narrowly escaped being killed by a suicide bomber this week, although the bomber killed two security guards in his security convoy, according to CBS News. CBS said Charles Duelfer, leading the US hunt for Iraq's WMD, was travelling in a convoy on Monday between Baghdad and the international airport when a suicide bomber in a car tried to ram his convoy. "Duelfer was travelling in...

IRAQ HAD NO STOCKPILES...SO WHAT? The media and the Democrats, along with The Poodle's campaign are all excited about Charles Duelfer's testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. His verdict? There are no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Big whoop...why is this really news? Haven't we been hearing this for over a year? The headlines all say the same thing...CIA adviser says Iraq had no banned weapons since 1991...no WMD in Iraq...and so on. The implication is essentially 'Bush lied, people died.' This is where media bias comes in big-time...as some of the stories showed....

Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004 11:37 a.m. EDT Iraq Survey Chief Duelfer: Saddam Was Developing Nukes Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons development program at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003, chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer has told Congress. In comments that received virtually no press coverage in the United States, Duelfer testified that Iraq was "preserving and expanding its knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons." One Iraqi laboratory "was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development," the top weapons inspector said. Duelfer's stunning assessment, delivered in March of this year, was first...

A U.S. official working with an international group of specialists searching post-Saddam Iraq for weapons of mass destruction said today that more work needs to be performed before arriving at any conclusions. "I do not believe we have sufficient information and insight to make final judgments with confidence at this time" regarding the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's WMDs, Charles A. Duelfer told Senate Armed Services Committee members here. Duelfer's testimony before the committee was behind closed doors and his unclassified remarks were posted on the CIA's public Web site. Duelfer said he's been the CIA's special adviser for strategy regarding...

The investigator picked by the CIA to replace David Kay as head of the U.S. team in Iraq hunting for weapons of mass destruction has told British reporters that he saw terrorists training near Baghdad in airplane hijack techniques resembling those used in the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 account to the London Observer, Charles Duelfer, the former No. 2 United Nations weapons inspector who was appointed Thursday to head the U.S.'s Iraq Survey Group, corroborated the testimony of Iraqi military defectors who said they helped train radical Muslim recruits to hijack U.S. airliners aboard a Boeing 707 fuselage...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE23 January 2004 DCI ANNOUNCES DUELFER TO SUCCEED KAY AS SPECIAL ADVISOR Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet announced today that Dr. David Kay will be stepping down as his Special Advisor for Strategy regarding Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Programs. The DCI also announced that Dr. Kay will be succeeded by Charles A. Duelfer, who served as Deputy Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) from 1993 until its termination in 2000 and is currently a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.Duelfer, 51, will be working...

<p>NEW YORK — Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official who once led a weapons inspection team in Iraq, is in Baghdad directing the U.S. search for banned weapons, diplomatic sources said.</p> <p>According to the sources, White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, a friend of Mr. Duelfer, tapped him to lead the new inspection effort. Neither the State Department nor the United Nations would confirm his arrival in the Iraqi capital.</p>

Welcome to PRI's The World: your daily international news magazine. Question: Ray Paulie was curios about something- “How the weapons inspections carried out by the UN and Iraq compare to the inspections carried out in Germany by France under the Peace Treaty of Versailles of 1919?” Comparison of Current Iraq Inspections and the Peace Treaty of Versailles 1919 by UNSCOM former Deputy Director Charles Duelfer Mullens: “French and other international inspectors did try to disarm Germany after the Treaty Of Versailles.” ”Who in the World turns to Charles Duelfer for a comparison with Iraq. For seven years Mr. Duelfer was...

After surviving torture, another high-level defector has escaped Iraq. In this exclusive report, he details Saddam's progress toward truly frightening capabilities: "dirty" bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missileBy David Rose January 2000: a chilly afternoon in Baghdad. At the downtown headquarters of Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission, the body responsible for arms development and purchase, its then chairman, General Amer al-Saadi, gathered 13 government officials around the boardroom table: scientists, soldiers, spies. More than a year had passed since the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, expelled the inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM),...