Free Republic

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

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...

The physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear weapons program for 25 years before the U.S. liberation claimed on Wednesday that Saddam Hussein gave up his nuclear ambitions in 1991 - even though the Iraqi dictator maintained a 500-ton stockpile of uranium and kept his nuclear research team intact right up until March 2003. In his first-ever broadcast interview, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar told the BBC that Saddam's al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons research facility was heavily damaged in the first Gulf War. "Everything was destroyed, such that the program couldn't be restarted at the time at all, and it never restarted," he claimed....

Saddam Hussein gave up all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the scientist who headed his nuclear program, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, said in a BBC interview on Wednesday. "There was no capability. There was no chemical or biological or any what are called weapons of mass destruction," said Jaffar in what BBC television called his first-ever broadcast interview. Speaking in Paris, where he now lives, Jaffar - who ran Saddam's nuclear program for 25 years - said there was "no development" of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons "at any time after 1991"....