No WMD in Iraq, source claims No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC. This will be the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group's interim report, the source told the presenter of BBC television's Daily Politics show, Andrew Neil. Downing Street branded the story "speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report". Mr Neil said the draft report - which the source said is due to be published next month - concludes that it is highly unlikely that weapons of mass destruction were shipped out of the country to places like Syria before the US-led war on Iraq. The bottom line is that the team has found no weapons of mass destruction Andrew Neil It will also say that Saddam Hussein mounted a huge programme to deceive and hinder the work of United Nations weapons inspectors, he said. Mr Neil said that according to the source, the report will say its inspectors have not even unearthed "minute amounts of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons material". They have also not uncovered any laboratories involved in deploying weapons of mass destruction and no delivery systems for the weapons. IRAQ SURVEY GROUP Took over WMD hunt from the US military in June Using intelligence to build picture of Iraqi weapons programmes Led by US general, but has some UK and Australian staff 1,300 staff include former UN weapons inspectors But, Mr Neil added, the report would publish computer programmes, files, pictures and paperwork which it says shows that Saddam Hussein's regime was attempting to develop a weapons of mass destruction programme. CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told the Reuters news agency he expected the report would "reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out". Reuters also quoted a senior US official as saying the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was expected to report finding "documentary evidence" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programmes. "Whether they will find or disclose anything on the weapons themselves, I doubt," said the official. 'Savage blow' UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: "This is speculation on an as yet unpublished report. "I await the report eagerly from Mr Kay (head of the survey group), as does the international community." Mr Straw argued that the whole international community had agreed Iraq's weapons programmes had posed - the issue had been what to do about it. People did not need the ISG report for evidence of that threat, he said. It was already shown in volumes of reports from UN inspectors. A Number 10 spokesman said "we don't have this text", but asked if the prime minister had seem the report, remarked: "We are not going into details of process." Mr Neil, a former editor of the Sunday Times, stressed he had not seen the draft report, and was reporting what a single source had said its findings were likely to be. He said the report was still to be finalised and could undergo some changes, but the source had been told the content of some key passages which were not expected to be substantively altered. Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo said if these details of the report were true, it would be a "savage blow" to the prime minister. 'Fake facilities' The inspectors have uncovered no evidence that any weapons were actually built in the immediate years before the war, the leak of the report suggests. It is alleged that Saddam Hussein's programme of deception involved fake facilities and infrastructure to deceive and hinder the work of UN weapons inspectors. The group may well conclude that Iraq had an elaborate and secret effort to maintain elements of its weapons programmes - in 'suspended animation' if you like Jonathan Marcus BBC defence correspondent Documents have been uncovered showing weapons facilities were concealed as commercial buildings, the report is likely to say. The ISG took over the job of finding WMD from the US military in June. The survey group, led by David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector and now a special adviser to the CIA, is a largely US operation, although it includes some British and Australian staff. Its 1,400 personnel are made up of scientists, military and intelligence experts, and its work is shrouded in secrecy. Its focus is intelligence, using documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists to build up a picture of the secret world of Iraq's weapons programmes. The survey group has been under pressure to prove the Bush administration's case that Iraq's weapons posed a significant threat. Gary Samor, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, recently told the BBC that UN inspection teams should have been sent back into Iraq as there would be much scepticism about the ISG's findings. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3135932.stm Published: 2003/09/24 19:48:16 GMT © BBC MMIII
Shocking that the BBC would report something like this. http://bbs.clutchcity.net/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64596
More premature conclusions from the liberal media....and what a surprise! MacBeth jumps all over the premature conclusions and broadcasts these rumors for all to see! Yawn.
Bigtexxx beat me to the punch--sadly, and I mean that with all sincerity, the BBC has shamed themselves and will now be discredited by conservatives and moderates alike--in reference to the provided link. However, the BBC's recent stumble wouldn't matter in any case as the conservative back-slappers tar ANYTHING as Liberal bias that isn't The Wall Street Journal or FOX news and it's cohorts...An impartial observer is forced to consider the BBC's earlier admission of "skewed" reporting; you might have given our neo-con brothers some extra ammunition MacBeth. That being said, I think the report will definitely facilitate some *spirited* commentary.....
It should come as no surprise that people don't believe the New York Times or the BBC anymore. They have proven themselves to be lacking in integrity. It's a shame the liberals continue to mindlessly buy into their arguments HOOK, LINE and SINKER
Hey TJ!!! I must have missed the news that WMD have been found. Enlighten me. I await your reply with great expectation!!!
Is this actually news? The point that everyone seems to be ignoring, and the most relevent point, IMO, is that Saddam was intentionally building FAKE facilities to mislead the intelligence community. Doesn't that lend credibility to the belief from the OUTSIDE that Saddam HAD WMD?
agreed. T_J, if you know that WMD are in Iraq, why don't you just tell everyone where there at so we can end all of this silliness.
Again, if you can't argue with the facts and evidence presented, attack the source. It's the easiest way for an intellectually dishonest person to refute a challenging idea without a single relevant fact.
"David Kay is in charge of our effort now, with some 1,500 inspectors and analysts and experts. He will provide an interim report later this month, and I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one. " Colin Powell Meet The Press September 7th, 2003 "David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports. I suppose there may be interim reports. I don't know when those will be, and I don't know what the public nature of them will be. " Condi Rice Press Briefing September 22nd, 2003
To redirect the thread back to the subject at hand, the dastardly distortionists at the BBC appear to have been right as the Times fronts this same story. Now, before all of you Times bashers get worked up into a slobbering fervor about how biased and slanted they are, please note that the article was co-written by Judith Miller. Judith Miller, if you recall, has had to defend herself against many claims of bias and slanting..........from the left. She's the bio weapons correspondent who traveled with the WMD finding unit and frequently ran "WMD's FOUND!" pieces that later had to be sheepishly retracted, and was the subject of a scathing Washington Post article which accused her of being too chummy and friendly with the military and her embedded unit(and, bizarrely, participating in battlefield promotion ceremonies of the units personnel )
sorry, i missed the facts and evidence in this report. all i saw was mindless speculation from a source that has severe credibility issues.
Expectations shrink in hunt for Saddam's weapons By John Diamond and Bill Nichols, USA TODAY U.S. search teams have dramatically scaled back their expectations for finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They are now looking for a relatively small volume of chemical munitions that might be buried there, according to three U.S. intelligence officials. Saddam Hussein's regime had no nuclear weapons and only minimal elements of a program to make them, the search teams have concluded, according to the intelligence officials. All three spoke on the condition they not be named, but all have knowledge of the contents of a draft of chief arms searcher David Kay's report, which could be presented to Congress as soon as next week. Saddam's suspected biological weapons, if they existed, would have a relatively short shelf life, and most or all could now be useless, these officials said. And Kay's team has found no evidence that Iraq shipped illegal weapons out of the country to Syria, for example to avoid detection by U.N. inspectors, as some administration officials suggested earlier this year. Weapons hunters believe the one remaining possibility is that the regime buried some chemical weapons, which can remain lethal for years, at sites as yet undiscovered. The volume of Iraqi chemical agents unaccounted for at the time of the U.S.-led invasion was small enough to fit in a backyard swimming pool, according to an analysis by Kay's team. "There is still a huge set of missing chemical weapons that will be found," one of the intelligence officials said. "They do not deteriorate as quickly as the biological weapons." It will take significant effort, the official said. "The guys have a lot of digging to do in hot, remote places to find them." As time goes by with no discoveries, the Bush administration is under pressure to back up its prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they represented a threat to the United States. The administration has not explicitly backed off that charge. "We believe that there were weapons of mass destruction and a weapons of mass destruction program" in Iraq, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday. He declined to address Kay's specific findings. But officials have also begun to emphasize the idea that the invasion of Iraq eliminated a future threat, and that the risk that Saddam had weapons that he could have given to terrorist groups had to be treated seriously in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. "Nine-eleven changed my calculation," President Bush said Thursday. "It made it really clear that we have to deal with threats before they come to our shore." Officials in Kay's 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group have also concluded, based on documents found in Iraq and information provided by captured members of Saddam's regime, that Iraq did destroy some of its chemical and biological weapons stockpile as the regime claimed before the U.S.-led war. Saddam apparently decided not to disclose the destruction of his chemical and biological weapons because he wanted potential enemies to think he still had them. U.S. intelligence analysts speculate that Saddam concluded that the weapons would do him little good against a modern force such as the U.S. Army, but that doubt about whether he still had them might deter enemies. One of the intelligence officials, who has seen early drafts of Kay's report, said it makes no mention of discoveries of actual weapons or banned materials but focuses primarily on circumstantial evidence of Iraq's attempts to acquire or develop weapons of mass destruction. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...030926/pl_usatoday/11872475&cid=710&ncid=1473
Yeah, CNN among others is now reporting the same story the BBC broke a couple days ago....Seems there are more messengers to attack, boys....or, of course, there is always the option of actually addressing the issue. Or not. Either way.
It may be that as time goes on there is less and less chance of finding any WMD's. Wouldn't the U.S. use their best most certain intel first. Then when that turned out to yeild zero in the way of WMD's they are stuck looking around hoping to find some hidden WMD's. That they obviously had no prior intel about or they'd know where to look.
Saddam apparently decided not to disclose the destruction of his chemical and biological weapons because he wanted potential enemies to think he still had them. U.S. intelligence analysts speculate that Saddam concluded that the weapons would do him little good against a modern force such as the U.S. Army, but that doubt about whether he still had them might deter enemies.
