US: 'Saddam Had No Weapons of Mass Destruction'


By Neil Mackay
Sunday Herald (Australia)
Monday 5 May 2003

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.
Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'

The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.

The senior US official added that America never expected to find a huge arsenal, arguing that the administration was more concerned about the ability of Saddam's scientists -- which he labelled the 'nuclear mujahidin' -- to develop WMDs when the crisis passed.

This represents a clearly dramatic shift in the definition of the Bush doctrine's central tenet -- the pre-emptive strike. Previously, according to Washington, a pre-emptive war could be waged against a hostile country with WMDs in order to protect American security.

Now, however, according to the US official, pre-emptive action is justified against a nation which simply has the ability to develop unconventional weapons.


Where Are Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction?

By Pauline Jelinek
Associated Press
Sunday 4 May 2003

WASHINGTON - In the American hunt for Iraq's banned weapons, drums of suspicious chemicals turn out to be crop pesticide; a cache of white powder is found to be explosives.
More than six weeks into the Iraq campaign, there has been a string of false alarms but no discovery of what the Bush administration said was its main justification for going to war - chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

"As someone who supported the war, ... I wish they'd hurry up and find something," said John Pike, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says "I'm not frustrated at all" by the lack of evidence so far.
A military official involved with the search teams said last week they are under "intense pressure from Washington to come up with something." The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the teams are overwhelmed with work and looking forward to promised reinforcements.

"Clearly the administration has got to deliver the goods," said Charles Pena with the Washington-based Cato Institute.

And the United States will, President Bush and Cabinet officers insist.

"We'll find them, and it's just going to be a matter of time to do so," the president said Saturday.
"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

But after scores of fruitless searches, other administration officials privately have stopped promising that. Some now say that instead of finding weapons stockpiles, they might find nothing more than documents and other evidence that the program once existed and was either destroyed or abandoned.
"Politically, this could be a big problem," said Paul Keer of the Arms Control Association, a Washington disarmament group. "If it turns out they ... exaggerated, people will say we attacked without justification - some are starting to say that now."

Before the war, administration officials did not just say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they also said they knew where some of them were.

In an unsuccessful bid for U.N. approval for the war, Powell showed the Security Council satellite photos and intelligence he said indicated weapons were being moved, and he named sites where he said chemical weapons were held.

"The intelligence community still stands behind that information. I do," he said Sunday.

U.S.-led teams of military and civilian experts have reported finding nothing conclusive, however, after visiting most of some 100 sites that prewar American intelligence agencies said were the most probable hiding places. Hundreds more sites remain.

Expected intelligence from senior captured Iraqis who might have been most knowledgeable about the government's secrets is not materializing. One by one, they are insisting under interrogation that the government had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs in recent years, U.S. officials say.
Pentagon officials said just days before the war that they had intelligence that chemical weapons had been distributed to some Iraqi military units. None has been found.

Hopes now may lie in greatly expanding the search effort. Advance teams for a group of some 1,000 experts, including former U.N. weapons inspectors and experts in intelligence, computers, demolition and such have started to arrive in the region to set up a larger program for analyzing intelligence, interrogating prisoners and scouring suspicious sites.

The new group will take control of the roughly 200 experts who have been searching so far, bringing additional expertise to the task. But officials say it is likely to be a couple of months before they are all assembled in Iraq.

Arguing for patience, Loren Thompson of the Washington-based Lexington Institute noted that U.N. inspections struggled with Iraq for a dozen years and could not find all they were looking for.

"I don't think the expectation was that this stuff would be sticking out like a sore thumb," he said. "I think eventually they'll find the weapons, but the important point is that the government that would have thought to use them against us is gone."

Some critics maintain that is not the point at all. They say the question always has been not whether Saddam had weapons, but whether those weapons were a big enough threat to the United States to justify war.

"If the Iraqis did not use them ... to defend an invasion of their own country, when were they ever going to use them, and how were they a threat to the United States?" asked Cato Institute's Pena. "That's the question that has to be asked and is being glossed over."