WMD in Iraq - Latest News

WMD in Iraq - Latest News

CIA Adviser Kay Amasses Evidence of Saddam’s WMD

That rejoinder will draw on the paper and on-the-ground evidence amassed day by day by a new coalition intelligence research project launched a month ago under Dr. David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, to winkle out hard evidence of Saddam Hussein’s proscribed weapons programs.

Thursday, July 31, Dr. Kay reported to the US Senate Intelligence Committee that his 1,400-strong team of American, British and Australian researchers had found in just over a month’s operation physical evidence of Iraqi activity on weapons of mass destruction. Without going into detail, Kay told the senators that the most progress had been made on biological weapons.

He was responding to the concern voiced by Senator Jay Rockefeller (Dem.-West Virginia) that the searches were being diverted away from finding the actual weapons. “Signs of a weapons program are very different from the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war,” said Rockefeller. “We did not go to war to disrupt Saddam’s weapons program, we went to war to disarm him.”

The Kay team spent the first month of its mission sorting into three batches what he described as “an estimated seven and-a-half miles of documents”, many of them collected by US military from Iraqi official buildings, but many others handed over by Iraqi civilians.

The data yielded is substantial:

Batch One: Records of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programming with notes on budgets, manpower and procurement requirements. Detailed are the Saddam regime’s plans, productions processes and timetables for WMD development as well as special programs for concealing it all from UN inspectors for twelve years. Saddam’s officials hid these thousands of documents from the United Nations Blix-ElBarardei inspection team and left them out of the voluminous “full accounting” Baghdad submitted to the UN Security Council before the war.

Batch Two: This group, which also consists of many thousands of pieces of paper, tracks the implementation of the WMD programs with time schedules and assessments of progress made in each category and inventories the stocks building up in the illegal arsenal. Scientists or engineers would often win bonuses for notable progress in their work.

Batch Three: This pile offers leads to locations where forbidden weapons may have been concealed when the records were drawn up and ways to access them, including the evidence of the transfer to Syria by Saddam’s agents of large parts of the forbidden program.

After talking in secret to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay declared there was a “truly amazing” deception program to throw UN weapons off the trail. We have people who participated in deceiving UN inspectors now telling us how they did it.