Alberta Lit-Together!

StrawberryPez said:

If I lived about 20 hours closer to you, I'd so be there.

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phrodeau said:

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Click to expand...

phrodeau said:

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Iraq weapons questions dog allies

U.S. downplays issues; Blair
faces criticism
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington of Site Survey Team 5, right, talks to Jamil Ali, manager of the al-Ameer artillery factory which was part of the former nuclear program, outside Fallujah, Saturday. The weapons hunters have so far been frustrated in their search for banned weaponry.



MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

May 29 — They stood shoulder-to-shoulder to convince the world that military action was the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein. Now the United States and Britain are facing growing criticism about the initial rationale for invading Iraq — the imminent threat posed by the nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

NEARLY TWO MONTHS after the end of the war, British and American experts have yet to find evidence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction — and reports from captured regime figures suggest they have denied their existence.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was visiting southern Iraq on Thursday, told reporters en route that he was convinced that Saddam did have such weapons.
“I have said throughout and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction,” Blair said. “And rather than speculating, let’s just wait until we get the full report back from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists,” Blair said.
But he also acknowledged the importance of the evidence, especially for his domestic audience. “It matters immensely,” he said, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat.”
The question flared anew after U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit as leader of the House of Commons in protest against the war, said Rumsfeld’s comments vindicated his own stance.
“If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said Wednesday.

45-MINUTES?
Further fueling the controversy was a BBC report Thursday suggesting that British intelligence agents were unhappy with the government’s claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction ready to use within 45 minutes.

Blair’s office responded that the claim, contained in an intelligence dossier released on Sept. 24, was entirely the work of British intelligence agencies.
“Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies,” Blair’s office said in a statement to the BBC.
The BBC, however, said its intelligence source didn’t dispute the origin of the information, but said the agencies were skeptical of the claim that weapons of mass destruction could be ready for use within 45 minutes.
“The information which I’m told was dubious did come from the agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn’t think it should have been in there,” said BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.
“They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently, and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong, they thought he had misunderstood what was happening.”
The BBC quoted an unidentified official as saying the claim was not in early drafts of the dossier, but was added in the week before publication at the behest of Blair’s office.
“It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable. Most things in the dossier were double-sourced but that was single-sourced, and we believe that the source was wrong,” the BBC quoted its source as saying.
Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram confirmed in an interview that there was a single source for the 45-minute claim. He denied, however, that Blair’s office had insisted on including the claim in the dossier.
“That is not the case. There was no pressure from No. 10 (Blair’s office). That allegation is not true,” Ingram told BBC radio.




But Blair opponents seized on the latest evidence to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

SUSPICIOUS TRAILERS
The issue hasn’t gained the same degree of traction in the United States, even as a series of top officials have sought to de-emphasize the importance of Saddam’s alleged arsenal.
To date, the closest the allies appeared to have come to discovering signs of banned weaponry were two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters.
In a report this week, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency said examination of the trailers revealed “an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system.
It added, “Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW [biological weapons] agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry.”
Information about the trailers, based largely on an Iraqi engineer’s description, was a key component of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons programs.
There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said.
Officials said they did not expect to find any biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

DESTROYING THE EVIDENCE?
In recent weeks, senior American officials in Iraq have raised the possibility that chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed prior to the conflict.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations that the whereabouts of Saddam’s arsenal remained a mystery. “We don’t know what happened,” he said, “It is also possible that they (the Iraqi government) decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”
And in two separate interviews, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — a fellow hawk within the Bush administration — was quizzed about the weaponry.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, he said the threat posed by Iraq’s weaponry was one of several reasons behind the decision to go to war.
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion had been “almost unnoticed but huge” — namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaida grievance.
Separately, Wolfowitz insisted in an interview with the Washington Post that the weapons would be found.
“No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight,” he said in comments published Thursday.
Wolfowitz said the hunt would continue in Iraq. “We’re a long way” from exhausting the search, he told the paper.

LAWMAKERS RESPONSE
However, the fruitless search has irked some lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.) said that experts so far have only discovered “fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool” in Iraq.



As a result, the senator — an outspoken critic of the war — said the administration’s “extensive hype of WMD” had become an embarrassment.
“It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he said.
Porter Goss, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is more concerned about the quality of the information made available to the administration ahead of the war.
“I have no doubts whatsoever that the administration worked on the basis of the intelligence that was given to them.” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “What I don’t know is how good that intelligence was, and it is our job to find out was it good; could they have done better.”
His opposite number on the committee, Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the Select Intelligence Committee, said she believed the U.S. intelligence.
She added, “I think the world is owed an accounting, but we haven’t found much at all. We’ve only found two mobile vans capable of making biological weapons. And that raises some questions.”

MSNBC.com’s Sean Federico O’Murchu, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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