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CIA to speculate on Iraq WMB in 2008


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WASHINGTON — Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.

The CIA plans for the report, due next month, to project as far as 2008 what Iraq might have achieved in its illegal weapons programs if the United States had not invaded the country last year, the officials said.

David Kay, who led the group before resigning in January, said that speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the team's mission.

Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should have been done."

Kay and others also questioned how such an assessment would be possible given the disarray that characterized President Saddam Hussein's government in recent years and external events that had altered the flow of illicit weapons technologies around the world.

Kay reported in January that Iraq's programs were dormant before the war. The country was still subject to United Nations sanctions and was facing a new round of inspections. Since then, authorities have cracked down on global weapons markets, most notably by unraveling the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

So they didn't find any WMD and in order to justify this they are going to "speculate on what Hussien's capacity could have looked like by 2008."

I can see the report now. "Had we not gone to war against him he could have bought the plans for a nuclear device from Pakistan and produced a nuclear device by 2008. he could have produced X tonnes of chemical agents for use on isreal etc." It will all look very technical and be based on several "facts" but any intelligent person will realize the number of variables and see that it is impossible to

even start to speculate. (Plus, the fact that Hussien had no WMD to start with would seem to suggest it wasn't a priority.)

My Lord. By this logic the US better go to war with the entire damn world because I am sure there are an awful lot of countries could easily have all sorts of WMD (and some already do) by 2008 along with regiems set to use them (and some do already).

This also shows the further "decline of the American empire" for the simple fact that reality shows how poor American intelligence is and has been. So instead of improving it, they assign their people to write reports about what could have happened when the possibilites for such are virtually unlimited. Furthermore, this sends the signal that the production of politically accepted intelligence is more important than the acquasition of the real facts to improve decision making at all levels. People die when decision making is made poorly based on bad information.

Anyone else remember all the reports the KGB sent back to Moscow about how "bad" things were in America all the time and how the collapse of the US was imminent just to appease people who didn't want to hear otherwise? Strange how neo-cons and communists are so very much alike.

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Dear idealisttotheend,

Before the war with Iraq began, the United Nations proposed tripling or quadrupling the number of inspectors from 250 to 1,000. The administration mocked that proposal saying that more inspectors would not help. Now after the war, the administration is building a team of 1,000 U.S. inspectors to go into Iraq in defiance of the United Nations, and is actively opposing letting U.N. inspectors back in.
We know inspectors can find weapons with a certainty and level of control that is unmatched. Between 1991 and 1998, U.N. weapons inspectors methodically destroyed more weapons than were destroyed during the whole of the Persian Gulf War, including 40,000 chemical munitions, 690 tons of chemical warfare agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, 48 SCUD missiles, a "super gun" and biological warfare-related factories and equipment. The International Atomic Energy Agency found and dismantled a developing Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
Both of these quotes are from the Center for Defense Information. Where are Iraq's WMDs? Destroyed. As they claimed. Why would the US not admit this? Here's another quote
By contrast, in March 1991 during Operation Desert Storm when U.S. troops blew up a cache of chemical weapons containing sarin gas at the Khamisiyah site in Iraq, they set off a decade-long inquiry into what actually happened. It took the Department of Defense five years to officially recognize that chemical weapons were present at that site and that U.S. soldiers had destroyed them. The blast also exposed large numbers of troops to chemical agents, one of the leading theories for the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, a debate that to this day, 12 years later, is still unresolved.

The author is Phillip Coyle, CDI senior analyst and former assistant Secretary of defence 1994-2001.

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