BASIC SPECIAL REPORT
BASIC Special Report 2004.1
· January 2004
Unravelling the Known Unknowns:
Why no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq
By David Isenberg and Ian Davis
Back to the Contents
Part I: Iraq's WMD Capability
To set the scene, there is no doubt that Iraqi armed forces have
had chemical and biological weapons and have in the past tried to
produce nuclear weapons. The seven plus years of UN inspections
after the 1991 Gulf War clearly established the existence of weapons
programs in all three areas. The world knew as far back as the Iraq-Iran
war that Iraq had successfully developed and used chemical weapons.
It is also widely known that Iraq used chemical weapons on its own
Kurdish population in Halabja in March 1988. And despite Iraq's
declaration in 1991 that it did not possess any biological weapons
or related items, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM)
uncovered a well-developed BW program in 1995.
Yet those same chemical and biological programs also suffered
significant disruptions and setbacks as a result of the 1991 war.
For example, the subsequent UN inspections regime, UNSCOM,
destroyed more than 480,000 litres of chemical agents and 1.8
million litres of chemical precursors in Iraq's arsenal, the vast
bulk of the stocks Iraq was said to possess. That, coupled with
Saddam Hussein's past refusal to comply with UN Security Council
resolutions to disarm, and to obstruct inspections by UNSCOM and
its successor, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and
Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), made gauging the scope and extent
of Iraq's biological and chemical programs very difficult.
Thus, despite formidable obstacles, and contrary to many public
statements by British and American officials and political leaders,
UN inspectors had made progress in narrowing down the
uncertainties. These uncertainties were compiled by UNMOVIC in a
report on "Unresolved Disarmament Issues: Iraq's Proscribed Weapons
Programmes", dated March 6, 2002. The report was released the day
before Hans Blix, UNMOVIC director, gave his last quarterly report
to the Security Council, just 13 days before the start of the
war.
This report grouped 100 'unresolved disarmament issues' into 29
clusters, and presented them by category: missiles, munitions,
chemical and biological weapons.
As the coalition forces advanced on Baghdad, increasing effort
was devoted to locating CB weapons, but to no effect. For example,
an entire artillery brigade, typically comprising 3,000-5,000
soldiers, was retrained to secure and examine sites suspected of
holding banned weapons. And the Pentagon offered rewards of up to
$200,000 for help in finding Iraqi leaders or chemical, biological
or nuclear weapons.15
Despite frequent media reports in the immediate aftermath of the
fall of Saddam's regime that coalition military forces were finding
'signs' and 'indications' of chemical and biological weapons, these
all turned out to be red herrings.
Evidence of Iraq's Nuclear Weapon
Capability
Iraq ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1969, but soon
began violating its obligations by secretly pursuing a nuclear
weapons program (centred around the Osiraq research reactor
financed by France in 1976). Israel's pre-emptive 1981 strike on
the reactor simply led to a much more ambitious development program
to produce highly enriched uranium. At the time of the first Gulf
War in 1991, Iraq was thought to be only a few years away from
producing enough highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.
After the Gulf War, IAEA inspectors supervised the destruction
of most of the nuclear weapon program facilities and removed all
weapons-grade material from Iraq. In 1998 the IAEA reaffirmed that
there were no indications of any clandestine nuclear weapons
capability in Iraq, and maintained this view right up to the point
at which its inspection teams left Baghdad. In its January 2003
report to the UN Security Council, for example, the IAEA clearly
indicated that there was no evidence that Iraq was producing
nuclear weapons.
However, rumours persisted that Iraq may have secretly
reconstructed some nuclear capabilities. These rumours were fueled
in particular by two false allegations from British and US
officials. First, that Iraq was trying to procure uranium from
Niger, and second, that Iraq was trying to procure aluminium tubes
for use as part of centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade
level.
False allegations of uranium acquisition from
Niger
The main part of the US Administration's case for claiming that
Iraq was continuing with its intent to acquire nuclear weapons was
based on forged documents initially circulated by British
intelligence.16 This was the bogus story that Iraq was
attempting to acquire uranium from Niger. President Bush referenced
the "evidence" in his State of the Union Message on January 28,
2003:
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the
1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons
development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was
working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
It is now known that elements of the Bush Administration knew
that this claim was bogus almost a full year
earlier.17
First, the CIA. We know that the CIA had strong doubts as early
as March 2002. In June 2003, the agency, facing criticism for its
failure to pass on a key piece of information about this claim,
admitted that it had sent a cable to the White House and other government
agencies in March 2002 stating that Niger officials had denied its
authenticity.18 But the cable was itself misleading in
that it failed to include the conclusions of a former US ambassador,
later revealed to be Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent
to Niger in February 2002.
Ambassador Wilson determined that documents purporting to
describe the attempted purchase had been forged. Instead, the CIA
cable attributed its assessment only to an anonymous source,
failing to mention the name of the former ambassador, a known
Africa expert, or that the agency had actually sent him to
Niger.
Ambassador Wilson subsequently wrote in The New York
Times: "Based on my experience with the administration in the
months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude
that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons
program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi
threat."19
Second, the four-star general. Although it has not received as
much attention as the report by Ambassador Wilson, Marine Gen.
Carlton W. Fulford Jr., a four-star general who was then deputy
commander of the US European Command, was asked to go to Niger in
2002 to inquire about the security of Niger's uranium. He said he
came away "assured" that the supply of "yellowcake" was kept secure
by a French consortium. The findings were passed up to Gen. Richard
B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.20 A
spokesman for Myers subsequently claimed that the general had "no
recollection of the information" but did not doubt that it had been
forwarded to him. "Given the time frame of 16 months ago,
information about Iraq not obtaining uranium from Niger would not
have been as pressing as other subjects," said Capt. Frank Thorp,
the chairman's spokesman.
Third, the British government. In early September 2002, the CIA
informed the UK government that the Niger claims were false. This
proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the UK to drop the
reference from an official intelligence paper.21
However, the British government rejected the US suggestion, saying
it had separate intelligence unavailable to the United States. Thus
the claim was still included in the British dossier released on
September 24, 2002.22
According to veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it
is at least possible that the false information about the uranium
from Niger was the result of a deliberate British propaganda
program: "What is generally agreed upon, a congressional
intelligence committee staff member told me, is that the Niger
documents were initially circulated by the British - President Bush
said as much in his State of the Union speech - and that '...the
Brits placed more stock in them than we did.' Hersh continued: "It
is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told
me, that "something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions
everywhere."23
Although a Parliamentary Committee report released in July 2003
exonerated the Blair government of deliberate distortion to justify
invading Iraq, it urged the foreign secretary to come clean as to
when British officials were first told that the Iraq-Niger
allegation was based on forged documents. The report noted that
"...it is very odd indeed" that the British Government has still
not come up with any other evidence to support its contention about
an Iraq-Niger connection.24
Fourth, classified intelligence. Also in the fall 2002, the CIA
was coordinating completion of a classified National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons
programs.25 The NIE was finally circulated to senior
administration officials and to Congress on October 1, 2002.
Although the NIE mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium
from three African countries, it warned that State Department
analysts were questioning the accuracy of the Niger claims and that
CIA personnel considered reports on other African countries to be
"sketchy." The summary conclusions about whether Iraq was
restarting its nuclear weapons program did not include references
to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa.26
Four days after the NIE was issued, CIA Director George J. Tenet
is reported to have called a Bush aide and asked that any reference
to allegations that Iraq had sought to obtain 500 metric tons of
uranium yellowcake in Niger be removed from a speech President Bush
was due to give in Cincinnati because it came from only a single
source.27 So why did the allegation end up in the
President's State of the Union address?
Evidently, seeking to find a way to include the controversial
Iraq-Niger charge in the address, a White House official, National
Security Council non-proliferation director Robert Joseph,
repeatedly modified the claim just a day or two before the speech,
until Alan Foley, director of the CIA's intelligence,
non-proliferation and arms control centre, affirmed its
accuracy.28
The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB),
chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, has
since concluded that the uranium claim was inserted into the Union
address because the White House was so anxious "to grab onto
something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, and in so
doing, disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that
the claim was questionable.29
What we now know, therefore, is that the alleged Iraqi
effort to buy uranium oxide was used by President Bush and other
senior administration officials as a key piece of evidence to
support their assertion that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons
program. The CIA's failure to pass on the details of what it knew
helped keep the uranium-purchase story alive until shortly before
the war in Iraq began, when the UN's chief nuclear inspector told
the Security Council that the documents were forgeries. It also
seems clear that US and British intelligence agencies concealed
information from each other and reached contradictory conclusions
about the disputed claims.30
The Bush Administration's subsequent handling of the issue also
served to compound the confusion. Officials first tried to defend
the President's statement by suggesting that it was also backed by
some unspecified evidence in addition to the forgeries, a line it
subsequently abandoned. Even then it did so grudgingly, only after
it had been cornered by Ambassador Wilson's decision to go
public.31
For example, on July 14, 2003 President Bush defended the "darn
good" intelligence he received, continuing to stand behind the
allegation. Bush said the CIA's doubts about the charge - that Iraq
sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore in Africa - were
"subsequent" to the January 28 State of the Union speech. But
Bush's position was at odds with those of his own aides, who
acknowledged that the CIA raised doubts that Iraq sought to buy
uranium from Niger more than four months before Bush's
speech.32
When asked by George Stephanopoulos on national television on
June 8, 2003, about the use of false evidence in the President's
State of the Union Address, National Security Adviser Condoleezza
Rice was at a loss to give a satisfactory
explanation.33
Other senior members of the Administration had expressed doubts
about the claim much earlier. Secretary of State Colin Powell said
that by the time he got to a meeting with CIA Director Tenet three
nights after the President's January 28 speech, his staff had
already dismissed any thought of using the "evidence" in his own
speech at the UN a few days later. The intelligence agencies, Mr.
Powell said, were "at that point not carrying it as a credible
item."
He added: "When I made my presentation to the UN and we really
went through every single thing we knew about all of the various
issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction, we did not
believe that it was appropriate to use that example anymore. It was
not standing the test of time. And so I didn't use it, and we
haven't used it since."34
Later President Bush and Dr. Rice placed the blame for the error
on the CIA. The President defended use of the allegation by saying
that the January 28 speech "was cleared by the intelligence
services", though, in an attempt to have it both ways, senior
Administration officials also continued to insist that the phrasing
was accurate - even if some of the underlying evidence was
unsubstantiated.35
Within hours of Bush's comments, CIA Director Tenet accepted
full responsibility for allowing the allegations into the January
28 address. He said that the information "did not rise to the level
of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches and
the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
Then, in a prepared statement that had been in the works for two
days, Tenet said that the CIA approved the State of the Union
speech before it was delivered: "I am responsible for the approval
process in my agency." The president had every reason to believe
the text presented to him was sound."
However, the CIA director also made it clear that members of the
President's National Security Council staff had proposed that
questionable information in drafts of the Bush speech be
included.36
Later, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley also
accepted blame for allowing faulty intelligence to appear in the
State of the Union speech. He took responsibility after revealing
that the CIA had sent him two memorandums warning that evidence
about Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in Africa was weak. He told
reporters that, while he received the memorandums before the
president gave a speech about Iraq in October, he had no memory of
the warning three months later when the issue came up again in the
State of the Union address.37
False allegations re: the purpose of aluminium tubes
shipments
Another untrue allegation concerned reports that Iraq was trying
to procure aluminium tubes from abroad, which the US Administration
claimed were to be used as part of centrifuges to enrich uranium to
weapons grade level. Thus, Condoleezza Rice told CNN's Wolf Blitzer
on September 8, 2002, that: "Saddam Hussein is actively pursuing a
nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq
of aluminium tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons
programs.''38 And Secretary of State Powell in his
presentation to the UN Security Council said, "Saddam Hussein is
determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined
that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire
high-specification aluminium tubes from 11 different countries,
even after inspections resumed."
But experts within the IAEA and even elements of the US
intelligence community disagreed. According to Mohamed El-Baradei,
the IAEA director-general, the tubes were consistent with efforts
to reverse engineer rockets. Similarly, US experts at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory advised that the tubes were all wrong for a
bomb program. These are the scientists who enrich uranium for
American nuclear bombs.
Greg Thielmann, a Foreign Service officer for 25 years, also
weighed in. Thielmann's last job at the State Department was acting
director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military
Affairs, responsible for analysing the Iraqi weapons threat for
Secretary Powell. He said that the dimensions of the tubes
perfectly matched those of a conventional Iraqi rocket.
In an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" in October 2003, Thielmann
confirmed this:
THIELMANN: The aluminum was exactly, I think, what the
Iraqis wanted for artillery.
PELLEY: And you sent that word up to the Secretary of
State many months before?
THIELMANN: That's right.39
Furthermore, a recent extensive analysis released by the
Institute for Science in International Security concluded:
Most experts inside and outside governments now believe
that the CIA was wrong about the tubes. It is increasingly doubtful
that Iraq actually planned to make centrifuges out of aluminium
tubes as the CIA claims. Equally doubtful is the more sophisticated
argument that Iraq hid a centrifuge program in a rocket procurement
program. In addition, the CIA is probably wrong that these tubes
are inappropriate for short-range rockets. Such a use is, in fact,
their most obvious and appropriate use.
The administration has refused to acknowledge that the
tubes that Iraq was trying to order would be used in rockets. By
failing to acknowledge this point, they are implying that Iraq
sought all the tubes for centrifuges and planned to build over
100,000 centrifuges, a massive program for a country like Iraq. On
its face, this claim is preposterous. But uncorrected, this
implication leaves the impression among policy makers and the
public that Iraq's nuclear weapons was far along and
massive.
The CIA and the Bush Administration have implied since
last spring that given time they will be proven right.
Increasingly, their continued intransigence on this issue looks
like an attempt to forestall the inevitable day of
reckoning.40
As the prospect of Iraq's acquiring nuclear weapons was always
the biggest threat, it is worth concluding this section with the
post-war views of Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Clinton
administration National Security Council staffer who supported the
war:
The ISG's findings to date are most damning in the
nuclear arena - as it happens, [this is] the segment of Iraq's WMD
program in which the initial findings are most likely to be
correct, because nuclear-weapons production is extremely difficult
to conceal. The perceived nuclear threat was always the most
disturbing one. The U.S. intelligence community's belief toward the
end of the Clinton administration that Iraq had reconstituted its
nuclear program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me
and other administration officials to support the idea of a
full-scale invasion of Iraq, albeit not right away. The [October
2002] NIE's judgment to the same effect was the real linchpin of
the Bush administration's case for an invasion.
What we have found in Iraq since the invasion belies
that judgment. Saddam did retain basic elements for a nuclear
weapons program and the desire to acquire such weapons at some
point, but the program itself was dormant. Saddam had not ordered
its resumption (although some reports suggest that he considered
doing so in 2002). In all probability Iraq was considerably further
from having a nuclear weapon than the five to seven years estimated
in the classified version of the NIE.41
Evidence of Iraq's Biological Weapon
Capability
At the beginning of the 1990s, Iraq's biological weapons program
included a broad and growing range of agents and delivery systems.
According to UNSCOM reports, Iraq had produced 8,500 litres of
anthrax, 20,000 litres of botulinum and 2,200 litres of aflatoxin.
Delivery systems under development included aerial bombs, rockets,
missiles and spray tanks. At the end of the first Gulf War, it was
known that Iraq had begun the large-scale weaponization of
biological agents, including more than 160 aerial bombs and 25
warheads for the 600-killometer-range Al Hussein missiles.
UNSCOM repeatedly reported that Iraq had failed to provide a
full and correct account of its biological weapons program and
UNMOVIC later expressed specific concerns regarding 10,000 litres
of anthrax, 3,000-11,000 litres of botulinum and up to 5,600 litres
of clostridium perfringens. However, many of these agents have
short shelf lives. In the case of the missing quantities of
anthrax, for example, Iraq did not seem to have produced dry,
storable anthrax; rather, it appears that only wet anthrax agents
(which have a relatively limited shelf life) were deployed.
Nonetheless, both the US and UK authorities made wide-ranging
pre-war claims about these "unaccounted for" stockpiles of
biological weapons, as well as the likelihood of an extensive
network of covert research and production facilities. Post-war
evidence to verify these claims is extremely weak, however, and
centres on two mobile trailers found in northern Iraq, a vial of
botulinum and some speculative findings regarding possible research
facilities for other agents.
False allegations about the purpose of mobile
trailers
In his presentation before the UN in February 2003, US Secretary
of State Colin Powell said that Iraq had as many as 18 trucks used
as mobile facilities for making anthrax and botulinum toxin. But
with nothing to distinguish them from ordinary trucks, he said that
such mobile trucks were likely to be difficult to find.
In April 2003, however, two mobile trailers were seized in
northern Iraq and were the subject of a joint CIA and Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) report on May 28. This report claimed
that the trailers were used for biological weapons agent
production, but most analysts have since argued that this
assessment is incorrect.42 David Wise, a veteran
chronicler of US government secrecy, noted that:
President Bush startled observers by saying on Polish
TV: "We've found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we
found biological laboratories. . . . And we'll find more weapons as
time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned
manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found
them."
Bush was referring to two mobile units that the CIA had
concluded were designed to manufacture biological substances. But
by artfully joining the "manufacturing devices or banned weapons"
in one sentence, his comments nicely fuzzed up what he meant by
saying, "We found them."43
According to a report in The New York Times, a classified
memo of June 2 from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research (INR) said that it was too early to conclude that the
trailers were evidence that Iraq had a biological weapons
program.44 And it was later revealed that engineering
experts from the DIA, one of the co-producers of the joint May
report, believed that the most likely use for the trailers found in
Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to
make biological weapons: "The team has decided that in their minds,
there could be another use for inefficient hydrogen production,
most likely for balloons."45
Senator Carl Levin subsequently raised some interesting
questions on this point in a letter to CIA Director George
Tenet:
If the New York Times article is accurate and the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research issued a report
disagreeing with the CIA's conclusion that the trailers were mobile
biological warfare agent production plants, why isn't this
dissenting view noted on the CIA's website?
If the New York Times article is accurate, do you
intend to add a notification of the State Department's dissenting
view on your website?
Is the statement in the New York Times article that the
C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies
before issuing the May 28 report accurate? Why would the CIA not
seek the views of other members of the Intelligence Community
before making public such a report?
Is it standard practice for the CIA to put reports like
this on its website? If so, what is the purpose of doing so? If
not, why was an exception made in this case and what was the
purpose of doing so?46
Ironically, at the same time that the Bush Administration
rejected Iraqi claims that the seized trailers were designed for
making hydrogen for weather balloons, the US Army declared that it
has its own fleet of vehicles designed for precisely the same
purpose.47
An official British investigation into the two trailers also
concluded that they were for the production of hydrogen to fill
artillery balloons. A British scientist and biological weapons
expert who examined the trailers in Iraq told The
Observer:
They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You
could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even
look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were -
facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill
balloons.48
The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for
artillery balloons caused further embarrassment to the British
authorities when it was disclosed that the system was sold to Iraq
by the British company, Marconi Command &
Control.49
Finally, in an August 2003 interview with the BBC, the US chief
weapons inspector, David Kay, said: "I think [talk of the mobile
laboratories] was premature and embarrassing . . . I don't want the
mobile biological production facilities fiasco of May to be the
model of the future."50
Exaggerated claims regarding a vial of botulinum and "new"
covert BW research
At least four other red herrings can be identified in regard to
Iraq's alleged BW program. First, in his interim report to Congress
in October 2003, David Kay said that Iraq had maintained a
clandestine network of about two dozen small laboratories, run by
Iraq's intelligence services, which contained equipment "suitable"
for chemical or biological research. As proof he cited the
discovery of the hidden vial of C. botulinum Okra B, which was
subsequently highlighted in speeches by President Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other
senior administration officials as proof that Iraq maintained an
illicit bio-weapons program before the war.
And in December 2003, Prime Minister Blair told British troops
that investigators had uncovered "massive evidence of a huge system
of clandestine laboratories" in Iraq. However, to date there has
been no independent verification of this evidence. UNMOVIC has been
unable to verify the claims because it has so far received no
information on the ISG activities other than Kay's publicly
available testimony before Congress.51 According to an
UNMOVIC spokesman, laboratories in and of themselves did not need
to be declared, only certain types of equipment that they might
contain. Without the ISG documentation, UNMOVIC cannot determine if
the equipment contained in the laboratories needed to be
declared.52
However, Paul Bremer, the Bush administration's point man in
Baghdad, later dismissed Tony Blair's exaggerated claim: "I don't
know where those words come from but that is not what [ISG chief]
David Kay has said," he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby programme. "I
have read his reports so I don't know who said that. It sounds like
a bit of a red herring to me. It sounds like someone who doesn't
agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks it
down."53
Moreover, the LA Times subsequently reported that the
vial of C. botulinum Okra B was purchased legally from a US
organization in the 1980s and is a substance that has never been
successfully used to produce a weapon.54 The single
vial, about two inches high and half an inch wide, had been stored
in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen refrigerator since 1993. It was
sealed and stored with 96 other apparently benign vials of
single-cell proteins and biopesticides - all in the scientist's
home.
The vial appears to have been produced by a nonprofit biological
resource centre in Virginia, the American Type Culture Collection,
which legally exported botulinum and other biological material to
Iraq under a Commerce Department licence in the late 1980s.
Second, in addition to the doubts about the botulinum B sample,
several independent experts have questioned the significance of
Kay's claim that he uncovered "new research" in Iraq on such
potential biowarfare agents as Brucella and Congo Crimean
Hemorrhagic Fever, as well as "continuing work" on ricin and
aflatoxin that were not declared to UN inspectors.
CCHF, as the hemorrhagic fever virus is known, is common in
Iraq. The World Health Organization reports that the disease, which
can cause intense bleeding and death, is "endemic in many countries
in Africa, Europe and Asia." There is no evidence that Iraq or
anyone else has weaponized it.55
Thus US administration officials were either ignorant about the
effects of botulinum toxin or deliberately misled the media about
it. This is evidenced by the comment of State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher: "You kill people with botulinum," he told
reporters. "It doesn't have any other use."
But actually, Botulinum A is widely marketed in the US under the
trade name Botox as a medical treatment for dystonia, or severe
muscle spasms, and as a cosmetic drug to get rid of wrinkles.
Certainly, if botulinum A seed stock is added to a warm nutrient
broth, it can yield bacteria that can be harvested to produce a
highly lethal neurotoxin that causes respiratory failure and death
in 24 hours. In late 1990, according to UN reports, Iraqi
scientists poured at least 10,000 litres of botulinum A toxin into
Al Hussein missile warheads and R-400 aerial bombs.
But Kay found botulinum B, not A. The Okra B strain is a common
cause of deadly food poisoning, usually from spoiled food in cans.
It is not very dangerous if inhaled. And, to recap, there is no
evidence that Iraq - or anyone else - has ever succeeded in
weaponizing botulinum B.56
Third, contrary to claims made before the war that Iraq
possessed smallpox, US weapons inspection teams found no evidence
that Saddam Hussein's regime was making or stockpiling smallpox.
This is rather ironic given that US fears of smallpox weaponization
led the Bush administration to launch a vaccination campaign for
about half a million US military personnel after the September 11
attacks - and to order enough vaccine to inoculate the entire US
population if necessary. A three-month search by "Team Pox" turned
up: disabled equipment that had been rendered harmless by UN
inspectors; Iraqi scientists deemed plausible who gave no
indication that they had worked with smallpox; and a lab thought to
be back in use though covered in cobwebs.57
Fourth, in August 2003 the Associated Press reported that
US weapons experts working in Iraq had concluded that Iraqi
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) were not designed for conducting
biological- or chemical-weapons attacks, contrary to claims made by
US officials prior to the war. More important, reports state that
prior to the war, US Air Force intelligence analysts and
analysts from the Missile Defense Agency said that they believed
that the UAVs did not pose a threat to either Iraq's neighbours or
the US.
According to Air Force Intelligence Analysis Agency director Bob
Boyd, there was also little evidence that the UAV program was
connected with Iraq's suspected biological-weapons program, as the
Iraqi drones were believed to be too small to carry
weapons.58
Evidence of Iraq's Chemical Weapon
Capability
During the 1980s, Iraq developed one of the most extensive
chemical weapons capabilities in the developing world, producing
over 200,000 chemical weapon munitions (half of which were used
during the war with Iran). After the first Gulf War, UNSCOM
destroyed more than 480,000 litres of chemical agents and 1.8
million litres of chemical precursors in Iraq. However, rough
estimates by UNMOVIC concluded that Iraq may have retained 80
tonnes of mustard gas, unknown quantities of weaponized VX nerve
agent, and stocks of tabun, sarin and cyclosarin.
Again, US and UK authorities made much of the thousands of
possible chemical munitions unaccounted for in their pre-war
assessments. In November 2002, for example, American intelligence
analysts are reported to have told the Bush administration that
Saddam Hussein had begun to deploy chemical weapons but would
almost certainly not use them unless the government's survival was
at stake.59 The DIA said Iraq would turn to the weapons
only "in extreme circumstances, because their use would confirm
Iraq's evasion of U.N. restrictions."60 However, in June
2003, the Bloomberg news agency reported the existence of a
September 2002 classified report from the DIA that said it had no
reliable evidence that Iraq possessed chemical
weapons.61
Despite searches at a number of suspected sites at Baija
(northern Iraq), Hindiya (near Karbala, central Iraq) and
?Nassiriya and Najaf (southern Iraq), no active chemical weapons
have been found.62 Instead, it seems almost certain that
most stocks were destroyed by inspectors in the mid 1990s and that
any remaining weapons have deteriorated beyond effective use.
According to an interview by opendemocracy.net with former
UNSCOM inspector Ron Manley, who was responsible for chemical
weapons destruction operations in Iraq from 1991-94:
Open Democracy: How much of the Iraqi chemical weapons
capability had been neutralised or destroyed by the time the UNSCOM
program stopped in 1994?
Ron Manley: The generally accepted figure is that at
least 95% of the capability had been removed. We had accounted for
a lot of the dual purpose chemical equipment, and what hadn't been
destroyed was under constant surveillance. We accounted for almost
all of the agents, even though the figures never quite added up.
Realistically, there was always going to be some stuff left lying
around, the odd warhead and certainly some precursor
chemicals.
But we were confident that we had got the vast majority
of the material, not least because nerve agents decay quickly
unless they are very pure and stabilised. When the Americans,
British, or Russians made nerve agents, for example, they needed
them to be stable for five to ten years, so as to last inside the
weapons systems.
But purifying and stabilising nerve agents is extremely
difficult. Iraqi agents were extremely unstable. After 12 months in
storage, for example, they would still be dangerous and kill some
people, but they would only be about 1-5% as effective as when they
were first made.
Open Democracy: The British governments September 2002
dossier says that, by that time, Iraq had the technology to
stabilise nerve agents and other chemical agents.
Ron Manley: I know what the dossier says and I agree
that they understood the principles of stabilisation of chemical
agents. I am not aware, however, that we have any evidence that
they actually put this knowledge into practice. Before you can
stabilise a nerve agent you have to make it more than 95% pure, and
we have no evidence of any kind to suggest that Iraq could produce
agent to that standard.
Open Democracy: What standards of purity were they
producing when you were there?
Ron Manley: About 60-70% at the point of manufacture.
You see, if you want to make pure nerve agent you've got to distil
it. But distillation of these materials, on a large scale, is very
difficult, and to my knowledge the Iraqis have never come close to
achieving it.
Personally, I think the dossier may be referring to
mustard gas. We know the Iraqis are capable of making mustard gas
of a very good quality, and that they knew how to stabilise it.
However, I would stress we sampled and analysed all of the mustard
gas that we came across, and, to my knowledge, we never found any
that had been stabilised. It doesn't mean there wasn't
any.
It's true that UN inspectors did find some mustard gas
shells in 1998 and the analysis showed the quality was not too bad,
but there was still no evidence of stabilisation.
There is also evidence, as I mentioned at the start,
that the Iraqis were moving towards the manufacture of nerve agents
using what's known as the binary process. This approach, which was
first developed and used by the United States, means that you
create and store two stable non-toxic materials, which when mixed
together produce the lethal agent. The precursors are only mixed
either immediately, before or even after the weapon is launched
when they form the agent in flight. The quality of the agent
produced by the Iraqi binary process was highly
questionable.
Open Democracy: Why couldn't the Iraqis have restarted
their programme?
Ron Manley: It's important to be aware of what that
would actually involve. The sarin plant at Al-Muthanna, for
example, was five storeys high and about 50 metres by 50 metres in
size. To make nerve agents in a facility requires massive air
filtration with a ventilation system capable of shifting and
treating something like two million cubic metres of air per hour,
if you don't want to kill off most of the workforce very quickly.
This is something that could be easily monitored.
Open Democracy: They could build a small plant which
would be less easy to detect.
Ron Manley: Well, yes, but then it wouldn't be possible
to make militarily significant quantities. You can make some in a
fume cupboard if you got the capabilities, but then you're talking
about making grams. One shell holds roughly five
kilograms.
If you want 10,000 shells you're looking at a lot of
material. A single al-Hussein warhead holds 300 litres of agent.
You can make 300 litres of agent in a fume cupboard, but it would
take a very long time indeed.
Open Democracy: What about VX, wasn't that used at
Halabja to massacre over 5,000 Kurds in 1988?
Ron Manley: No. There are many debates about what was
used at Halabja. My own view is that the Iraqis used an agent
called tabun, which is one of the first of the nerve agents to be
produced, by the Germans in the 1930s. Tabun is difficult to make.
One of the final steps involves the use of sodium cyanide, and it
is hard to remove this to obtain pure tabun. The Iraqis never did
that successfully. Their tabun was therefore heavily contaminated
with cyanide.
According to several medical studies, some of the
people who died at Halabja showed symptoms of cyanide poisoning
while others were showing symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. This
is what you would expect if the Iraqi forces used impure tabun. But
that's a personal opinion, nobody has ever confirmed exactly what
was used there. Certainly tabun was used, but was it the only
agent? Some say both tabun and mustard gas were used. Both are of
an order of magnitude less toxic than VX and there is no evidence
that the latter was used.
UN chief inspector Hans Blix's report says there may be
something like three and half tonnes of VX we cannot account for.
Iraqi scientists had told us back in 1992 that they had tried to
produce VX, and succeeded in producing between two and three tonnes
of very impure material; this is recorded in the UN inspections
files.
You have to understand the importance of documents in a
regime of Saddam's sort. The order comes down from on high saying
make me three tons of VX. You do not go back and say, Sir, we tried
and failed because if you do, you disappear. Instead, you send back
a memo saying, Sir, we have produced your three tonnes of
VX.
I know something about VX. The reason VX is not easy to
produce is because the chemistry is incredibly difficult. I think
the Iraqis never cracked the process to produce a good quality VX.
Some, maybe, and it would, at best, probably have been no more than
50-60% pure and would have deteriorated very quickly. Even if they
had made it by 1991 it would be absolutely useless by
now.63
The difficulty of storing biological and chemical agents lends
credibility to the theory that Iraq did not keep making such
weapons and instead focused on "dual-use" design and engineering.
The aim was to activate production and shipping of warfare agents
and munitions directly to the battlefield in the event of war. That
view is held by Rolf Ekeus, the first head of UNSCOM, as explained
during a US television interview in September 2003:
Jim Lehrer: Why do you believe no weapons of mass
destruction have been found since the end of the war?
Rolf Ekeus: I think that one has been first of all not
looking not in the right direction or for the right stuff. My
feeling is very clearly that the Iraqi policy long before the war
was to build capability to develop its capabilities to produce
weapons for the situation, for the conflict situation, not to
produce for storage and create a problem of storage
management.
Jim Lehrer: So it was a mistake to think that there
were stockpiles buried underground or in warehouses or hidden in
various places in Iraq in the first place?
Rolf Ekeus: Definitely, that's my, I tried to tell that
for years, that the Iraqi policy was to have a capability to
develop qualities -- to develop engineering, design, new types of
weapons, especially in the chemical weapons and the bioweapons
field in order to at a given moment, when the situation appears, to
activate the production, because they learned during the 80's that
when they produced say especially nerve agents like sarin, vx and
all these things, when they put it in drums, in a storage places,
after at least months the quality deteriorated.
And the reason was that Iraq never - at least in the
early years - managed to get pure enough warfare agent, it was a
matter of science.64
Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who resigned over
Britain's decision to participate in the war against Iraq, has also
written about the limited shelf life of chemical and biological
munitions:
When the Cabinet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government discussed the dossier on Hussein's WMD, I argued that I
found the document curiously derivative. It set out what we knew
about Hussein's chemical and biological arsenal at the time of the
1991 Gulf War. It then leaped to the conclusion that Hussein must
still possess all those weapons.
There was no hard intelligence of a current weapons
program that would represent a new and compelling threat to our
interests. Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic
scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have a finite
shelf life - a principle understood by every pharmacist. Go to your
medicine chest and check out the existence of an expiration date on
nearly everything you possess. Nerve agents of good quality have a
shelf life of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of
about three years. Hussein's stocks were not of good quality. The
Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical munitions were of
such poor standard that they were usable for only a few
weeks.65
Conclusions
It is obvious that pre-war descriptions of the threat diverge
significantly from what has actually been discovered in the nine
months since the war. For example, when Secretary of State Colin
Powell's report to the UN Security Council is compared to David
Kay's interim report, no single clear and unambiguous confirmation
of any of the former's claims in the latter can be found. As a
detailed article in the New York Review of Books argues:
To place the reports side by side is instructive. Kay
says nothing whatever about eleven of Powell's twenty-nine claims,
which we may take as a functional equivalent of "not found." At the
top of this list are the "100-500 tons of chemical weapons agent,"
the sarin and mustard gas, the possible 25,000 litres of anthrax,
the "few dozen" Scud missiles, the "wherewithal to develop
smallpox." Not found.
The cars full of "key files" being driven around by
Iraqi intelligence agents? Not found.
The "warheads containing biological warfare
agent...hidden in large groves of palm trees"? Not
found.
The hundreds of documents signed by Iraqi scientists
putting them on notice that death would be the punishment for
anyone who talked? Not found.
The factory with thousands of centrifuges intended to
produce fissionable material for atomic bombs with the telltale
aluminium tubes? Not found.
It is difficult to convey the completeness of Kay's
failure to find just about anything Powell cited as a justification
for war. What Kay did find seems paltry and tentative. According to
Powell, "a source said that 1,600 death row prisoners were
transferred in 1995 to a special unit for...[chemical and
biological] experiments.... An eyewitness saw prisoners tied down
to beds, experiments conducted on them, blood oozing around the
victims' mouths, and autopsies performed to confirm the effects."
Kay found nothing so dramatic - only "a prison laboratory network,
possibly used in human testing of BW agents...." Possibly
used?
What happened to the 1,600 death row prisoners, the
victims oozing blood, the autopsies? Powell said, "Iraq has
produced [the nerve agent] VX and put it into weapons for
delivery." Kay cites a "key area" where Iraq "may have engaged in
proscribed or undeclared activity...including research on a
possible VX stabilizer...." Where are the actual "weapons for
delivery"? Where is the actual VX? Not found.
In a few cases David Kay almost declares flatly that
something isn't there - for example, that Iraq has had no chemical
weapons program since 1991. Not just the weapons are missing; there
has been no program - for twelve years. But then Kay hedges.
This conclusion, he writes, is based on "multiple sources with
varied access and reliability"-in other words, they could be wrong,
something might still turn up.
At the UN Powell had displayed schematic drawings of
"biological weapons factories on wheels," adding that: "...we
know that Iraq has at least seven of these...factories." Kay
says only that his Iraq Survey Group has "not yet been able to
corroborate" the existence of any mobile factories.
So it goes-no evidence backing Powell's claim that
Iraqi military units had been ordered to prepare for chemical
warfare against invading armies; no evidence that "Iraq undertook
significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear
weapons...."
Did David Kay find anything that might be described as
a weapon? Not really. The closest he came was to retrieve from the
home of a scientist a single vial - a "reference strain" - of a
biological organism which could be used to make a biological
weapon, or ordinary botox. Of all the weapons cited by Powell in
his UN speech only one was actually found - sixteen empty munitions
discovered by the UN inspectors in a scrap heap. The CIA had at one
time worried that there might be 30,000 more, but Kay failed to
find them. The conclusion seems inescapable-on the eve of war, and
probably for years beforehand, Iraq had no weapons of mass
destruction, and it had no active program to build
them.66
Unsurprisingly, Secretary Powell remains unrepentant about the
validity of his evidence. In an interview with the television show
Nightline he said:
Powell: Everything we have seen over those years, since
they actually used these weapons in 1988, led us to the conclusion,
led the intelligence community to the conclusion that they still
had intent, they still had capability, and they were not going to
give the up that capability. What they actually had, in the way of
inventory, was something we had to try to analyse. And we put the
best people on it. And the intelligence community presented all the
information they had in national intelligence estimates, in
information they provided to the Congress. It was also consistent
with information that UN inspectors had come up with over the
years. And foreign intelligence agencies had come up with over the
years. When I went before the world last February 5th, at the
United Nations Security Council, with Director Tenet there with me,
I was presenting, in the most balanced way I could, but in a way to
make the case, the considered view of the US intelligence
community. Which was shared by most of the intelligence community
cells throughout the world in different
countries.67
But Secretary Powell has conceded that despite his assertions
last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the
government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al
Qaeda. "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the
connection," he said.68 "I am confident of what I
presented last year, the intelligence community is confident of the
material they gave me, and this game is still
unfolding."69
In retrospect, some of the claims made about Iraq's alleged NBC
weapons should have been questioned more closely. Consider the
following testimony by Dr. Thomas David Inch BE, Former Deputy
Chief Scientific Officer, MoD, at Porton Down and former Chief
Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, before the UK Foreign
Affairs Committee regarding the intelligence dossier released by
the British government in September 2002:
On page 18 of the report at paragraph 3 it says that
the intelligence suggests that: "These stocks would enable Iraq to
produce significant quantities of mustard gas within weeks and of
nerve agent within months." From a technical perspective I find it
very difficult to understand unless the intelligence was very firm,
very clear and very precise why it should be possible to make
mustard gas within weeks but it would take months to make nerve
agents. If you have the facilities in place, the previous knowledge
and so on, and the plants available, it does not seem to me that it
takes more time to make one than the other. The question is: how
good was the intelligence? That would be the kind of question that
I would wish to probe to find out whether it was hard or soft
material that we are looking at. There are other
examples.70
US and British pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMD capability
remains the key issue upon which we now focus our attention.
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