WMD conjecture after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

The post-Saddam WMD search began with the fall of Saddam Hussein as ruler of Iraq and the occupation by American forces. Great controversy was generated when stockpiles of these weapons were not found.

However, on October 6, 2004, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), Charles Duelfer, announced to the United States Senate Armed Services Committee that the group found no evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had produced and stockpiled any weapons of mass destruction since 1991, when UN sanctions were imposed.

The report found that "The ISG has not found evidence that Saddam possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but [there is] the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, although not of a militarily significant capability." It also concluded that there was a possible intent to restart all banned weapons programs as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped, with Hussein pursuing WMD proliferation in the future : "There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted..." No senior Iraqi official interviewed by the ISG believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever.

Iraq acceded to the Geneva Protocol on September 8, 1931, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on October 29, 1969, signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, but did not ratify until June 11, 1991. Iraq has not signed to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

At the time adherence was established economic sanctions against Iraq were to be lifted. Iraq's adherence to the treaty was, however, never established to the satisfaction of the United Nations Security Council and the sanctions were not lifted until after the 2003 war.

UNSCOM encountered various difficulties and a lack of cooperation by the Iraqi government. In 1998, UNSCOM was withdrawn at the request of the United States before Operation Desert Fox. Despite this, UNSCOM's own estimate was that 90-95% of Iraqi WMD's had been successfuly destroyed before its 1998 withdrawal. After that Iraq remained without any outside weapons inspectors for five years. During this time speculations arose that Iraq had actively resumed its WMD programmes. In particular, various figures in the George W. Bush administration as well as Congress went so far as to express concern about nuclear weapons:

"Well, I think I’ve just given it, Tim, in terms of the combination of his development and use of chemical weapons, his development of biological weapons, his pursuit of nuclear weapons." —Dick Cheney, Vice President, Meet The Press, March 16, 2003

"According to the CIA's report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons. There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons." Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) - Congressional Record, October 9, 2002

Intelligence shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was heavily used as support arguments in favor of military intervention with the October 2002 C.I.A. report on Iraqi WMD's considered to be the most reliable one available at that time.

At the beginning of 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom administrations both claimed that there was absolutely no doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was developing more. Nevertheless proof of these assertions could not be found.

There is dispute about whether Iraq still had WMD programs after 1998 and whether its cooperation with the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) was complete. UN Chief Weapons Inspector said in January 2003 that Iraq has, "...not genuinely accepted U.N. resolutions demanding that it disarm." On 7 March, in an address to the Security Council, Hans Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, appeared to take a more positive view describing current Iraqi level of cooperation as "active or even proactive". Attributing increased Iraqi initiative to "outside pressure" he stated his estimate that it would take several months for all outstanding WMD issues to be resolved. United States officials treated Blix's report dismissively.

Even in lieu of actual WMD programs, legal justification for the campaign was claimed due to the alleged lack of cooperation with UN inspectors by Iraq. The stated intention of the U.S. plan to invade Iraq was to eliminate Iraq's ability to threaten its neighbors or its own people with weapons of mass destruction.

File:10 jan 2004 EOD mortar rounds iraq.jpg

Photographed 10 January 2004. An Icelandic or Danish EOD wearing what is known as “ABC Svær”, a double protected ABC suit (Normal camouflage ABC-suit with another layer on top of that) while examining mortar rounds that were suspected to contain illegal chemicals.

On May 27, 2003, a secret Defense Intelligence Agency fact-finding mission in Iraq reported unanimously to intelligence officials in Washington that two trailers captured in Iraq by Kurdish troops "had nothing to do with biological weapons." The trailers had been a key part of the argument for the 2003 invasion; Secretary of State Colin Powell had told the United Nations Security Council, "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like." The Pentagon team had been sent to investigate the trailers after the invasion. The team of experts unanimously found "no connection to anything biological"; one of the experts told reporters that they privately called the trailers "the biggest sand toilets in the world." The report was classified, and the next day, the CIA publicly released the assessment of its Washington analysts that the trailers were "mobile biological weapons production." The White House continued to refer to the trailers as mobile biological laboratories throughout the year, and the Pentagon field report remained classified. It is still classified, but a Washington Post report of 12 April 2006 disclosed some of the details of the report. According to the Post:

A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.

On May 29, 2003, Andrew Gilligan appears on the BBC's Today program early in the morning. Among the contentions he makes in his report are that the government "ordered (the September Dossier, a British Government dossier on WMD) to be sexed up, to be made more exciting, and ordered more facts to be...discovered." The broadcast is not repeated.

On May 30, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz stated in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that the issue of weapons of mass destruction was the point of greatest agreement among Bush's team among the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In Vanity Fair, he said, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason..." The remainder of the quote, which was not included in the article, is as follows, according to a Pentagon transcript: "...but, there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two." The same day, General James Conway, senior Marine commander in Iraq, expressed similar thoughts in a satellite interview with reporters at the Pentagon.

In the build up to the 2003 war the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material. It is now clear that they could not be used for that purpose.

The story was followed up with television appearances by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice all pointing to the story as part of the basis for taking military action against Iraq.

Miller's sources were introduced to her by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile favourable to a US invasion of Iraq. Miller is also listed as a speaker for The Middle East Forum, an organization which openly declared support for an invasion.

In May 2004 the New York Times published an editorial which stated that its journalism in the build up to war had sometimes been lax. It appears that in the cases where Iraqi exiles were used for the stories about WMD were either ignorant as to the real status of Iraq's WMD or lied to journalists to achieve their own ends.

Various nuclear facilities, including the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility and Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, were found looted in the month following the invasion. (Gellman, 3 May 2003) On June 20, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that tons of uranium, as well as other radioactive materials such as thorium, had been recovered, and that the vast majority had remained on site. There were several reports of radiation sickness in the area. By June 7, 2003, many American and British media sourcesbegan questioning the credibility of the Bush administration, and John Dean even brought up the possibility of impeachment for "lying to Congress and the American people", although this idea has largely fallen by the wayside since some members of Congress had access to much of the same information as the White House. It has been suggested that the documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned in Iraq by looters in the final days of the war.

After he was captured by U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who ran Saddam's nuclear centrifuge program until 1997, handed over blueprints for a nuclear centrifuge along with some actual centrifuge components, stored at his home — buried in the front yard — awaiting orders from Baghdad to proceed. He said, "I had to maintain the program to the bitter end." In his book, "The Bomb in My Garden," the Iraqi physicist explains that his nuclear stash was the key that could have unlocked and restarted Saddam's bombmaking program.

On 30 May 2003, The U.S. Department of Defense briefed the media that it was ready to formally begin the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a fact finding mission from the coalition of the Iraq occupation into the WMD programs developed by Iraq, taking over from the British-American 75th Exploitation Task Force.

On 4 June 2003, U.S. Senator Pat Roberts announced that the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence that he chaired would "as a part of its ongoing oversight of the intelligence community...conduct a Review of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."

On 9 July 2004, the Committee released the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq.

On July 17, 2003, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an address to the US congress, that history would forgive the United States and United Kingdom, even if they were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. He still maintained that "with every fiber of instinct and conviction" Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.

On October 3, 2003, the world digests David Kay's Iraq Survey Group report that finds no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, although it states the government intended to develop more weapons with additional capabilities. Weapons inspectors in Iraq do find some "biological laboratories" and a collection of "reference strains", including a strain of botulinum bacteria, "ought to have been declared to the UN." Kay testifies that Iraq had not fully complied with UN inspections. In some cases, equipment and materials subject to UN monitoring had been kept hidden from UN inspectors. "So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas," Kay would say in a later interview. In other cases, Iraq had simply lied to the UN in its weapons programs. The US-sponsored search for WMD had at this point cost $300 million and was projected to cost around $600 million more.

According to Kay, Iraq worked on WMDs right under the noses of UNMOVIC. Kay said that Iraq had tried to weaponize ricin "right up until" Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In David Kay's statement on the interim report of the ISG the following paragraphs are found:

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis."

"With regard to delivery systems, the ISG team has discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if OIF had not occurred, dramatically breached UN restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War."

"ISG has gathered testimony from missile designers at Al Kindi State Company that Iraq has reinitiated work on converting SA-2 Surface-to-Air Missiles into ballistic missiles with a range goal of about 250km. Engineering work was reportedly underway in early 2003, despite the presence of UNMOVIC. This program was not declared to the UN."

"ISG has developed multiple sources of testimony, which is corroborated in part by a captured document, that Iraq undertook a program aimed at increasing the HY-2's range and permitting its use as a land-attack missile. These efforts extended the HY-2's range from its original 100km to 150-180km. Ten modified missiles were delivered to the military prior to OIF and two of these were fired from Umm Qasr during OIF -- one was shot down and one hit Kuwait."

Another notable statement is the following:

"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 phrase of 'WMD-related program activities' was later used in George Bush's state of the union speech. Bush's critics, often not realizing the origin of the statement, derided Bush for unclear wording and trying to "lower the bar" on confirming his pre-war WMD-claims.

Demetrius Perricos, then head of UNMOVIC, stated that the Kay report contained little information not already known by UNMOVIC. Many organizations, such as the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, have claimed that Kay's report is a "worst case analysis"

On 29 October U.S. intelligence spokesmen claimed that Iraqi WMDs and programs had been comprehensively hidden before or immediately after the fall of Bagdhad, with some elements of the programs being shipped out of the country.

On 14 December Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces. Time Online Edition reports that in his first interrogation he was asked whether Iraq had any WMDs. According to an official, his reply was: "'No, of course not, the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us.' The interrogator continued along this line, said the official, asking: 'if you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?' Saddam’s reply: 'We didn’t want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy.'" Later interviews with Saddam's military leaders indicated that Saddam didn't want it demonstrated through inspections that he didn't possess WMDs in certain places in order to pose a threat against those who might attempt a coup.

On 3 February 2004, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced an independent inquiry, to be chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, to examine the reliability of British intelligence relating to alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Butler Review was published 14 July 2004.

One notable excerpt:

"We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded." Nevertheless, this report does not substantiate its findings and remains unverifiable.

On 6 February 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush named an Iraq Intelligence Commission, chaired by Charles Robb and Laurence Silberman, to investigate United States intelligence, specifically regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

On 8 February 2004, Dr Hans Blix, in an interview on BBC TV, accused the US and British governments of dramatising the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the government of Saddam Hussein. Quote:

"It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it."

Bill Tierney, former UNSCOM inspector and Arabic linguist said: "On nukes, some analysts wait until there is unambiguous proof before stating a country has nuclear weapons. This may work in a courtroom, but intelligence is a different subject altogether. I believe it is more prudent to determine what is axiomatic given a nation’s capabilities and intentions. There was no question that Iraq had triggering mechanisms for a nuke, the question was whether they had enriched enough uranium. Given Iraq’s intensive efforts to build a nuke prior to the Gulf War, their efforts to hide uranium enrichment material from inspectors, the fact that Israel had a nuke but no Arab state could claim the same, my first-hand knowledge of the limits of UNSCOM and IAEA capabilities, and Iraqi efforts to buy yellowcake uranium abroad (Joe Wilson tea parties notwithstanding), I believe the TWELVE years between 1991 and 2003 was more than enough time to produce sufficient weapons grade uranium to produce a nuclear weapon. Maybe I have more respect for the Iraqis’ capabilities than some."

In an interview with BBC in June 2004 David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, made the following comment:

"Anyone out there holding — as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said — the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, [is] really delusional."

In a January 26, 2004 interview with Tom Brokaw of NBC news, Mr. Kay described Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs as being in a "rudimentary" stage. He also stated that "What we did find, and as others are investigating it, we found a lot of terrorist groups and individuals that passed through Iraq." In responding to a question by Mr. Brokaw as to whether Iraq was a "gathering threat" as President Bush had asserted before the invasion, Mr. Kay answered:

Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It’s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.

Speaking on FOX News Sunday, David Kay said "We know there were terrorist groups in state [Iraq] still seeking WMD capability. Iraq, although I found no weapons, had tremendous capabilities in this area. A marketplace phenomenon was about to occur, if it did not occur; sellers meeting buyers. And I think that would have been dangerous if the war had not intervened."

No concrete evidence has been produced indicating any collaboration by the government of Iraq with alleged terrorist groups, or indicating what terrorist groups would have taken part in the alleged "marketplace phenomenon".

A year after Bush administration claims about Iraqi "bioweapons trailers" were discredited by American experts, a biological weapons specialist from Australia has claimed that U.S. officials were still suppressing the findings, and that a CIA officer told him it was "politically not possible" to report that the White House claims (about WMD) were untrue.

In June of 2004, the United States removed 2 tons of low-enriched uranium from Iraq. Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists concludes that 2 tons of low-enriched uranium can be enriched and be made into a nuclear weapon.

Former senior Iraqi general, Georges Sada, has said that in late 2002, Saddam ordered that all the stockpiles of WMD were to be moved to Syria. On January 25, 2006 on Hannity & Colmes on Fox News, the former number 2 officer in the Iraqi Air Force stated:

Well, I want to make it clear, very clear to everybody in the world that we had the weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, and the regime used them against our Iraqi people. It was used against Kurds in the north, against Arabs — marsh Arabs in the south...

He went on to say that those weapons still existed in 2002:

Well, up to the year 2002, 2002, in summer, they were in Iraq. And after that, when Saddam realized that the inspectors are coming on the first of November and the Americans are coming, so he took the advantage of a natural disaster happened in Syria, a dam was broken. So he — he announced to the world that he is going to make an air bridge...

And then described what became of those weapons:

They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria.

A similar claim was made by Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, a former Israeli officer who served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces from July 2002 to June 2005. According to the New York Sun, General Yaalon told the paper in December 2005 that "[Saddam] transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria." In April 2004, he was quoted as saying that "perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria." The Fall 2005 Middle East Quarterly reported that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stated in a December 23, 2002 appearance on Israeli TV that "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria."

These allegations were considered in the Iraq Survey Group Duelfer report addenda. The report stated:

ISG formed a working group to investigate the possibility of the evacuation of WMD-related material from Iraq prior to the 2003 war. This group spent several months examining documents, interviewing former Iraqi officials, examining previous intelligence reports, and conducting some site investigations. The declining security situation limited and finally halted this investigation. The results remain inconclusive, but further investigation may be undertaken when circumstances on the ground improve.

The report concluded that "Based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials."

In testimony before a Senate panel in October 2004, Charles Duelfer stated "What I can tell you is that I believe we know a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points...But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say." In media interviews before the addenda was published, intelligence and congressional officials went further, saying they had not seen any information indicating that WMD or significant amounts of components and equipment were transferred from Iraq to neighboring Syria or elsewhere.

General Sada also claims some of the chemical weapons moved to Syria were later seized when a chemical attack by al-Qaeda against Amman, Jordan was foiled. Some 20 tons of chemical weapons were moved by the attackers from Syria to Jordan in preparation for the attack. The attack was planned and funded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, several reported finds of chemical weapons were announced. During the invasion itself, there were half a dozen incidents in which the US military announced that it had found chemical weapons. All of these claims were based on field reports, and were later retracted. After the war, many cases — most notably on April 7, 2003 when several large drums tested positive — continued to be reported in the same way.

Another such post-war case occurred on January 9, 2004, when Icelandic munitions experts and Danish military engineers discovered 36 120-mm mortar rounds containing liquid buried in Southern Iraq. While initial tests suggested that the rounds contained a blister agent, a chemical weapon banned by the Geneva Convention, subsequent analysis by American and Danish experts showed that no chemical agent was present. It appears that the rounds have been buried, and most probably forgotten, since the Iran-Iraq war. Some of the munitions were in an advanced state of decay and most of the weaponry would likely have been unusable.

The reason for the high false positive rates is that field tests using the ICAM (Improved Chemical Agent Monitor) are very inaccurate, and even the more time consuming field tests have shown themselves to be poor at determining whether something is a chemical weapon. According to Donald Rumsfeld, ""Almost all first reports we get turn out to be wrong," he said. "We don't do first reports and we don't speculate." Many chemicals used in explosives, such as phosphorus, show up as blister agents. Other chemicals, such as pesticides (especially organophosphates such as malathion), routinely show up as nerve agents. Chemically, they are quite similar — the main difference is that some organophosphates kill only insects, and are consequently used as insecticides.

On April 27 2004 FOX News reported that operatives confessed to planning a chemical attack against Jordan under the orders of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Jordanian officials said the plotters entered Jordan from Syria with trucks filled with 20 tons of toxic chemicals. The attack planned to kill some 80,000 civilians. The chemicals, reported as 'Iraqi nerve gas' by Hal Lindsey's International Intelligence Briefing, were said to have been part of a much larger cache buried in Syria.

On May 2 2004 a shell containing mustard gas, was found in the middle of street west of Baghdad. The Iraq Survey Group investigation reported that it had been previously "stored improperly", and thus the gas was "ineffective" as a useful chemical agent. Officials from the Defense Department commented that they were not certain if use was to be made of the device as a bomb.

On May 15 2004 a 155 mm artillery shell was used as an improvised bomb. The shell exploded and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to a nerve agent (nausea and dilated pupils). On May 18 it was reported by U.S. Department of Defense intelligence officials that tests showed the two-chambered shell contained the chemical agent sarin, the shell being "likely" to have contained three to four liters of the substance (in the form of its two unmixed precursor chemicals prior to the aforementioned explosion that had not effectively mixed them). Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told the Associated Press that "he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a hidden stockpile, although he didn't rule out that possibility." Kay also considered it possible that the shell was "an old relic overlooked when Saddam said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s." It is likely that the insurgents who planted the bomb did not know it contained sarin, according to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, and another U.S. official confirmed that the shell did not have the markings of a chemical agent.

In a July 2 2004 article published by The Associated Press and reported by Fox News that more WMD not destroyed by the Iraqi Regime were discovered in South Central Iraq by Polish Allies. Sarin Gas warheads dating back to the last Iran-Iraq war were trying to be purchased by terrorists for $5000 a warhead. The Polish troops secured munitions on June 23, 2004. After being tested, it turned out that the warheads did not in fact contain sarin gas. The Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad announced that the munitions "were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals." The US abandoned its search for WMDs in Iraq on January 12 2005.

On August 14, 2005, The Washington Post published an article reporting a raid on a suspected chemical weapons facility in Iraq where (according to the US military) chemical weapons had been uncovered and were now in the process of being classified. The Post reported that "the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration cited evidence that Saddam Hussein's government was manufacturing weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for the invasion. No such weapons or factories were found."

"No one was more surprised than I that we didn't find (WMD's)." General Tommy Franks December 2nd 2005.

On February 11, 2006, Congressman Pete Hoekstra appeared on MSNBC to discuss the "Saddam Tapes." Reports claim Saddam discusses WMD and links to terrorists on these tapes. Hoekstra called for the U.S. government to put the remaining 35,000 boxes of documents on the internet so Arabic speakers around the world can help translate the documents. The U.S. government is in the process of releasing these documents. The documents are known as Operation Iraqi Freedom documents.

On February 12, 2006, former Pentagon investigator Dave Gaubatz appeared on Fox News Channel and claimed he and fellow military investigators identified four underground bunkers with five foot thick concrete walls in southern Iraq believed to hold WMD. Iraqi informants brought these sites to the attention of Gaubatz and his colleagues. Gaubatz claims that, for various reasons, these sites have never been inspected by the Iraq Survey Group or the CIA. Gaubatz is making a plea the sites be inspected at this time because of the recent release of the Saddam Tapes. In the Saddam tapes, one of Saddams aides insist the inspections are meaningless, since Iraq retained the technical skill and personele to reconstitute the program at a later date.

On February 17-20, 2006, the Intelligence Summit aired 12 hours of translated Saddam Tapes at a conference outside of Washington, D.C. In one of the taped conversations an aide to Saddam Hussein asks "Where was the nuclear material transported to?" He then says, "A number of them were transported out of Iraq." The Washington Times editorialized on another moment caught on tape that revealed "Saddam was actively working on a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation. This is particularly worrisome because of the date of the conversation: It took place in 2000, nearly five years after Iraq's nuclear programs were thought to have stopped." The Washington Times also noted that former Pentagon official John Shaw spoke at the conference about the role of Russian "spetsnaz," or special forces troops in the movement of WMD out of Iraq and into Syria and Lebanon.

Duelfer Report

On September 30, 2004, the U.S. Iraq Survey Group Final Report concluded that, "ISG has not found evidence that Saddam Husayn (sic) possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but the available evidence from its investigation—including detainee interviews and document exploitation—leaves open the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq although not of a militarily significant capability." Among the key findings of the final ISG report were:

1. Evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date;
2. Concealment of nuclear program in its entirety, as with Iraq's BW program. Aggressive UN inspections after Desert Storm forced Saddam to admit the existence of the program and destroy or surrender components of the program;
3. After Desert Storm, Iraq concealed key elements of its program and preserved what it could of the professional capabilities of its nuclear scientific community;
4. Saddam's ambitions in the nuclear area were secondary to his prime objective of ending UN sanctions; and
5. A limited number of post-1995 activities would have aided the reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program once sanctions were lifted.

The ISG did not, though, uncover indications that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapon research and development activities since 1991.

In a speech before the World Affairs Council of Charlotte, NC, on April 7, 2006, President Bush stated that he "fully understood that the intelligence was wrong, and [he was] just as disappointed as everybody else" when U.S. troops failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Despite the intelligence lapse, Bush stood by his decision to invade Iraq stating:

But what wasn't wrong was Saddam Hussein had invaded a country, he had used weapons of mass destruction, he had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction, he was firing at our pilots. He was a state sponsor of terror. Removing Saddam Hussein was the right thing for world peace and the security of our country.

External links

• Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding Iraq
• LookSmart - Iraq WMD Controversy directory category