Pelican Parts Forums - They got the BASTARD! (apparently)

Well, with statements like the ones above it appears that you didn't read the entire article.

Quote:

A question of accounting

In short, the longstanding "consensus" in official circles that Iraq must have been harboring illegal arms has always had somewhat murky origins. Behind the thundering allegations issued at heavily publicized official press conferences, a careful observer might have noticed quiet signs of dissent: the "senior intelligence analyst" who anonymously told the Washington Post four days before the war started (3/16/03) that one reason U.N. inspectors didn't find any weapons stockpiles "is because there may not be much of a stockpile." Or Rolf Ekeus, the former head of UNSCOM, who told a Harvard gathering three years ago (AP, 8/16/00) that "we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's [WMD] capabilities fundamentally." Or, for that matter, UNSCOM alum Scott Ritter, whose publicly aired doubts about the alleged weapons led a raft of scornful newspaper profiles to scoff that he must be some kind of crank (New York Times Magazine, 11/24/02; Washington Post, 10/21/02).

Ultimately, the claims and counterclaims about Iraq's weapons boiled down to a question of accounting. In the early 1990s, Iraq had handed over thousands of tons of chemical weapons to the U.N. inspectors for disposal. But it hid the existence of other pre-Gulf War weapons programs, such as VX and anthrax, and the inspectors only learned the full details of these programs after the 1995 defection of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, Iraq's weapons chief. By 1996, the U.N. teams had destroyed Iraq's last remaining dual-use production equipment and facilities, rendering the regime incapable of making new weapons. All that was left unaccounted for were old quantities of biological and chemical arms that Iraq produced in the late 1980's but could not prove it had eliminated.

The regime claimed these materials had been hurriedly destroyed in secret in the summer of 1991 as part of an ultimately failed effort to conceal how far their weapons programs had gotten. Using forensic techniques, the inspectors confirmed that Iraq indeed "undertook extensive, unilateral and secret destruction of large quantities of proscribed weapons" (UNSCOM report, 1/29/99), but they were never able to measure exactly how much had been destroyed--leaving open the possibility that some remained hidden. This was the famous "26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one-and-a-half tons of nerve agent VX, [and] 6,500 aerial chemical bombs" that administration officials spent the prewar period crowing about (Ari Fleischer press conference, 3/3/03).

With remarkable unanimity, former Iraqi scientists interviewed since the war about the status of the weapons programs--including VX specialist Emad Ani, presidential science advisor Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi, nuclear scientist Jafar Jafar and chief U.N. liaison Brigadier-Gen. Ala Saeed--have all maintained that the regime did, in fact, destroy these stockpiles in the early 1990s, as it claimed. "According to a U.S. intelligence official, the top scientists are all 'sticking to the party line, that Saddam destroyed all his WMD long ago,'" the Los Angeles Times reported (4/27/03).

But journalists looking for clues should not have had to wait for the end of the war to find evidence of this. "In my view, there are no large quantities of weapons," former UNSCOM chief Rolf Ekeus told Arms Control Today in March 2000. "I don't think that Iraq is especially eager in the biological and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage. Iraq views those weapons as tactical assets instead of strategic assets, which would require long-term storage of those elements, which is difficult. Rather, Iraq has been aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately should it need to."

Given that no serious evidence of ongoing Iraqi production capability ever turned up--especially after inspectors returned last year and were given unfettered, no-notice access to suspected sites--there were few grounds for assuming that Iraqi retained a significant WMD capability.