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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

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Introduction

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

At the end of April last year, BASIC published a Special Briefing to review the evidence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), code for nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons.¹ At that time, we reviewed:

a) the evidence of Iraqi possession of chemical and biological weapons as uncovered by the UN inspectors prior to their withdrawal;

b) the evidence uncovered during the subsequent military 'liberation' of Iraq; and

c) the evidence accumulated following the fall of the Saddam regime.

We provisionally concluded that Iraq's possession of NBC weapons was likely to be nowhere near as extensive as US and UK officials claimed before going to war. More than eight months later, we now know with almost total certainty that there were no such weapons and only stunted research programs that had been inhibited by UN inspectors and sanctions. In short, Iraq was not the imminent threat we were told it to be.

Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, the United States and other coalition forces have been looking hard for signs of the NBC weapons that Iraq was alleged to have, or at least, for the research and development programs that would allow such weapons to be produced at short notice.² The forces formed their own special units and claimed that these were far more effective than the often unfairly criticized UN inspectors, even though the US inspectors used many of the same techniques.³

In fact, at least initially, the US search units suffered from disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among various military units, and equipment shortages.⁴ They also failed to prioritise sites containing critical information, such as the state-owned al-Fattah company in Baghdad, which designed all the rockets fired by Iraqi troops in 1991 and in 2003.⁵

When they eventually got up to speed, the US inspectors searched in vain, turning up items like vacuum cleaners as opposed to VX nerve gas.⁶ And when nothing significant was found, they looked instead for signs at least that Iraq had been striving to maintain NBC research and development programs in order to produce such weapons in short order.⁷

Recently though, it appears that the US administration has abandoned the search and tacitly acknowledges that there is nothing to find. The signs are as follows:

a) With little else to show for months of effort, the Pentagon recently began reassigning Arabic translators and intelligence analysts from the weapons search to other, more pressing needs, such as the fight against Iraqi insurgents;

b) Some of the Energy Department's top nuclear-weapons experts, detailed to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the US group leading the search, over the summer, have come home.

c) Most recently the Bush administration has withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment.⁸

d) Except for a handful of Iraqi scientists who worked on biological agents in the mid-1990s, many former Iraqi weapons experts held by the US have been released.⁹

e) According to recent news reports, David Kay, the head of the ISG, is considering stepping down in the next few months - before the group he leads completes its search and issues a final report.¹⁰

Ironically, the recent celebrated capture of Saddam Hussein results, at least in part, from a significant shift in American strategy in November. This shift reassigned intelligence personnel from the WMD search to a reinvigorated manhunt to find the remaining "high-value Iraqi targets" - the former regime leaders. The ISG was key to that effort.. ¹¹

The conclusion is inescapable: there is nothing to be found. This means that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair made a WMD mountain out of what, at best, was a molehill. As a recent detailed report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concludes, "Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs."¹²

Such misrepresentation should be astonishing. For the existence of such weapons was the primary rationale for invading Iraq. (For a reminder of the causus belli advanced by leading American politicians prior to the war, see Appendix 1.¹³ ) Yet the public and the media have become so inured to official misrepresentation, to use the most charitable term, that few will be astonished by the Carnegie report.

In fact, Washington has begun distance itself publicly from the principal, official justification that Saddam's WMD posed a threat (to the region, the US and Britain). However, Tony Blair has continued to claim that "massive evidence" of illegal Iraqi weapons activity has been uncovered.¹⁴ This assertion, made before Christmas, was even denied at the time by the senior US official in Iraq, Paul Bremer.

On the eve of the publication of the Hutton inquiry report into the circumstances surrounding the death of UK government scientist David Kelly, this BASIC Report provides a timely update and summary of the evidence that has been accumulated by the US inspectors in Iraq and from other public sources over the past eight months. The evidence confirms that US and British forces were led into battle on spurious grounds.

The report also attempts to shed light on the reasons for this: why did the US and UK governments exaggerate? Or did they themselves misunderstand what went before? Were they themselves misled by available pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMD capability?

The report is structured as follows. Part I reviews the pre and post-war evidence of Iraq's WMD capability, and specifically identifies examples of ways in which US and UK authorities got it wrong:

• Pre-war: allegations of uranium acquisition from Niger; allegations regarding the purpose of shipments of aluminium tubes; and claims about the scope of chemical weapon stockpiles
• Post-war: allegations about the purpose of mobile trailers found in northern Iraq; and allegations regarding a vial of botulinum and "new" covert BW research.

Part II reviews the flaws and ambiguities in both US and British pre-war intelligence analysis on Iraq's WMD capability, with particular reference to the use of Iraqi defectors and other misleading indigenous human intelligence.

Part III draws some conclusions and makes some recommendations. The main conclusion is that the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq suggests very strongly that the UN weapons inspectors succeeded in their mandate, and that the Iraqi government complied with its obligations. The key recommendations are:

• Tony Blair and George Bush must acknowledge that they were wrong about Iraq's WMD and show that they are taking sweeping action to rectify the concerns that led to this miscalculation.
• Learn the right lessons: by invading Iraq, which had no WMD, the US and Britain are less able to respond to real WMD proliferation crises.
• Review the role of intelligence: it is vital that future non-proliferation and counter-proliferation strategies are based upon carefully collected and analysed open evidence rather than on prejudice or political expediency.
• Bring the spooks out of the shadows: the intelligence agencies need greater visibility and accountability.
• Re-examine the doctrine of pre-emption: Over reliance on intelligence makes the doctrine of pre-emption a flawed and dangerous instrument of foreign policy.
• Return UN Inspectors to Iraq to confer some much needed legitimacy to the post-conflict search for weapons.
• Create a permanent international cadre of inspectors as suggested by Hans Blix.
• Support multilateral and international law-based solutions to WMD proliferation: We have reached a pivotal moment in inter-state relations with a real opportunity to shape a new world order based on the rule of law.
• WMD threat reduction should begin at home: it is not just a 'rogue' state problem.

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