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Thread: The Search for WMD has ended.

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    God/dess Silverback's Avatar
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    Default The Search for WMD has ended.



    Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month
    Critical September Report to Be Final Word

    By Dafna Linzer
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Wednesday, January 12, 2005; 1:00 PM


    The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

    In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

    Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

    Asked if the ISG had stopped actively searching for WMD, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said today: "That's my understanding." He added, "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."

    Duelfer "is continuing to wrap things up at this point on an addendum to the report which will be issued sometime next month," McClellan said. "That's not going to fundamentally alter the findings of his earlier report."

    President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

    Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House had been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.

    Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted.

    "There's no particular news in them, just some odds and ends," the intelligence official said. The Government Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said.

    The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad.

    The ISG, established to search for weapons but now enmeshed in counterinsurgency work, remains under Pentagon command and is being led by Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Joseph McMenamin.

    Intelligence officials said there is little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer's last report answered as many outstanding questions as possible. The ISG has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt.

    Satellite photos show that entire facilities have been dismantled, possibly by scrap dealers who sold off parts and equipment to buyers around the world.

    "The September 30 report is really pretty much the picture," the intelligence official said.

    "We've talked to so many people that someone would have said something. We received nothing that contradicts the picture we've put forward. It's possible there is a supply someplace, but what is much more likely is that [as time goes by] we will find a greater substantiation of the picture that we've already put forward."

    Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the money. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.

    Several hundred military translators and document experts will continue to sift through millions of pages of documents on paper and computer media sitting in a storeroom on a U.S. military base in Qatar.

    But their work is focused on material that could support possible war crimes charges or shed light on the fate of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot who was shot down in an F/A-18 fighter over central Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, the opening night of the Persian Gulf War. Although he was initially reported as killed in action, Speicher's status was changed to missing after evidence emerged that he had ejected alive from his aircraft.

    The work on documents is not connected to weapons of mass destruction, officials said, and a small group of Iraqi scientists still in U.S. military custody are not being held in connection with weapons investigations, either.

    Three people involved with the ISG said the weapons teams made several pleas to the Pentagon to release the scientists, who have been interviewed extensively. All three officials specifically mentioned Gen. Amir Saadi, who was a liaison between Hussein's government and U.N. inspectors; Rihab Taha, a biologist nicknamed "Dr. Germ" years ago by U.N. inspectors; her husband, Amir Rashid, the former oil minister; and Huda Amash, a biologist whose extensive dealings with U.N. inspectors earned her the nickname "Mrs. Anthrax."

    None of the scientists has been involved in weapons programs since the 1991 Gulf War, the ISG determined more than a year ago, and all have cooperated with investigators despite nearly two years of jail time without charges. U.S. officials previously said they were being held because their denials of ongoing weapons programs were presumed to be lies; now, they say the scientists are being held in connection with the possible war crimes trials of Iraqis.

    It has been more than a year since any Iraqi scientist was arrested in connection with weapons of mass destruction. Many of those questioned and cleared have since left Iraq, one senior official said, acknowledging for the first time that the "brain drain" that has long been feared "is well underway."

    "A lot of it is because of the kidnapping industry" in Iraq, the official said. The State Department has been trying to implement programs designed to keep Iraqi scientists from seeking weapons-related work in neighboring countries, such as Syria and Iran.

    Since March 2003, nearly a dozen people working for or with the weapons hunt have lost their lives to the insurgency. The most recent deaths came in November, when Duelfer's convoy was attacked during a routine mission around Baghdad and two of his bodyguards were killed.
    "He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

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    Veteran Member devilsadvocate667's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    It's official; BUSH IS A LIAR AND A WAR CRIMINAL!!!

    Live with your head in the sand, cons. Every last excuse Chimpy made for the war was a LIE! That equates to WAR CRIMINAL! Especially when over 100,000 Iraqi civilians died because of Bush's lies and your blind support of them.

    I don't want to hear your whining about "WHAAAAHHHH THE LIBS VOTED FOR THE WAR". Bush lied to congress, he provided false evidence. Worship Bush as deeply and irrationally as you want it doesnt change reality. Bush is a liar, plain and simple! Everything Bush stands for is a lie! You've pinned your dreams on a fraud and a failure!


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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    That cartoon was fantastic! What newspaper published it, Silverback?
    You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Free your mind, and your ass will follow.
    George Clinton

    ______________________________________

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    God/dess Silverback's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    It was a single frame from a Boondocks strip from the time when Bush was talking abbout advancing the space program, again. I was having the strip emailed daily for awhile.

    Anway, easily the most cynical (and therefore funny) comic available in mainstream newspapers.

    Here's today's (available at http://www.ucomics.com/boondocks/ ):
    "He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

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    God/dess NinaDaisy's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    I thought it ended months ago when the official party line turned into making the war about "freedom". Whatever, not like the neocons ever really gave a shit.
    "She has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer...But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers"

    Ernest Hemingway on writer, aviation pioneer and horse trainer Beryl Markham


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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    Quote Originally Posted by NinaDaisy
    I thought it ended months ago when the official party line turned into making the war about "freedom". Whatever, not like the neocons ever really gave a shit.
    Geezus...where have I been? I thought that the war was to rid Iraq of Saddam and try him for crimes to humanity...

    The people that supported the war (the weapons manufacturers) could care less why Bush went there...they only cared that they just made billions of dollars in sales to the Armed Forces. Greed is as greed does.

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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    Quote Originally Posted by NinaDaisy
    I thought it ended months ago when the official party line turned into making the war about "freedom". Whatever, not like the neocons ever really gave a shit.
    That's correct- they don't care and never really have as long as they get their money, even if it is blood money.

    The whole "free the Iraqi people" was just proganda intended to get support from select groups of voters. The war is now and has always been about US power and control and never about anything remotely humanitarian in nature. If it had been, I would have supported this war. But since it is not, AT ALL - I just can't support it.

    I feel sorry for the voters (which I think there are many of) who fell for the "Spreading Freedom" propganda. I feel still even more sorry for the ones who will never be bright enough to realize once and for all that it's just a big lie.


    Venus got it right, it's all about greed. Powertrips and greed.

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    Banned Melonie's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    The people that supported the war (the weapons manufacturers) could care less why Bush went there...
    This doesn't jive in the case of the region's MAJOR weapons and weapons systems suppliers ... Russia, Germany and France ! But of course before US troops arrived they were making much more money selling weapons to allow middle easterners to kill Israelis, as well as kill each other.

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    Member NurseGoodbody's Avatar
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    Default Re: The Search for WMD has ended.

    I dont mean to speak for Nina but.....uhm I think she meant the US weapons suppliers , like for example- the one good old Dickey boy still gets checks from

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