Los Angeles Times
October 7, 2004
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein did not produce or possess any weapons of mass
destruction for more than a decade before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last
year, according to a comprehensive CIA report released Wednesday.
Hussein intended to someday reconstitute his illicit programs and rebuild at
least some of his weapons if United Nations sanctions were eased and he had the
opportunity, the report concluded. But the Iraqi regime had no formal, written
strategy to revive the banned programs after sanctions, and no staff or
infrastructure in place to do so, the investigators found.
The report
said that Hussein's illicit-weapons capability was "essentially destroyed" after
the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was never rebuilt. It said Hussein considered
the U.N. sanctions "an economic stranglehold" that in effect curbed his ability
to build or develop weapons in the ensuing 12 years.
The only known
attempts to produce illicit weapons came a year after the 2003 invasion, the
report said i n a new disclosure. In March of this year, investigators found
that insurgents in Baghdad were trying to recruit former weapons scientists to
develop nerve gases and ricin, a biological toxin, to attack U.S. forces. The
discovery led to a series of raids.
The 1,000-page report by Charles
A. Duelfer, head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group weapons-hunting teams, is the
most definitive account yet of Iraq's long-defunct weapons programs and comes as
the presidential campaign increasingly is focused on President Bush's decision
to go to war in Iraq primarily to disarm Hussein of suspected chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.
More than 1,000 U.S. troops have been
killed, and thousands more have been wounded.
Based on 16 months' work,
the report vastly expands on previous efforts by U.N. inspectors and Duelfer's
predecessor, David Kay.
In his report, and in testimony Wednesday to
the Senate Armed Services Committee, Duelfer refuted many of the Bush
administration's most dramatic claims before the war, basing his findings in
part on extensive information gleaned from interrogations of Hussein and some of
his top aides.
Duelfer said, for example, there was no evidence that
Hussein sought to import uranium from Africa, as Bush claimed in his 2003 State
of the Union speech. Duelfer said investigators also found no evidence that
Hussein had passed illicit weapons material to Al Qaeda or other terrorist
organizations, or had any intent to do so.
Bush, who delivered a
national security campaign speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, did not mention
the weapons report, but White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters
aboard Air Force One that it showed that Hussein "was a threat we needed to take
seriously." He said Hussein "retained the intent and capability to produce
weapons of mass destruction" and was "working to undermine sanctions."
Democrats seized Wednesday on the dense, three-volume report as proof that
Hussein did not pose a threat to the United Stat es before the war, as the White
House continues to argue.
"In short, we invaded a country, thousands of
people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Sen.
John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), the ranking
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said: "The Duelfer report is yet
another example that there really are two Americas. There's the one that exists
in the Bush fantasy world, and then there's the real America."
Among
the report's highlights:
• The Iraqi president had abandoned
his nascent nuclear program and had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons by December 1991. No infrastructure or other evidence was
found showing that the illicit weapons programs were revived before the 2003
war.
• Hussein knew he had no banned weapons before the war
and believed Washington ultimately would make peace with his secula r regime to
counter the growing power and nuclear threat of what he considered his main
enemy: neighboring Iran's Islamic government.
• Hundreds
of individuals and companies from around the world, and government agencies and
officials in Syria and Yemen, helped funnel conventional weapons and other goods
to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions and are named in the report.
• Widespread kickbacks and other corruption in the U.N.'s
"oil-for-food" program "rescued Baghdad's economy from a terminal decline
created by sanctions" and helped subsidize the Iraqi regime. Overall, Hussein
amassed more than $11 billion from oil smuggling and other illicit
programs.
Duelfer spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed
session Wednesday morning, and then in public to the Senate Armed Services
Committee.
Asked in the Senate committee hearing to explain how U.S.
intelligence agencies could have been so wrong about Iraq's weapons, Duelfer
said that U.S. analysts were convinced that Hussein would never give up his
quest for weapons because they were vital to his survival.
Iraq's use of
more than 100,000 chemical munitions against Iranian troops during the 1980s war
with Tehran had helped end the war and save Hussein's regime. Duelfer said
Hussein also believed that his chemical and biological weapons had deterred the
U.S.-led coalition from marching on Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War.
Duelfer also stated that U.S. intelligence had "almost no contact with Iraq
over more than a decade" and had become increasingly separated from reality in
the country. He noted, for example, that U.S. experts had insisted before the
war that the presence of decontamination trucks was clear evidence that chemical
weapons were nearby. But, "when you spend time in Iraq," Duelfer said, "you
realize the Iraqis could be selling ice cream out of those vehicles."
Prodded to answer politically charged questions during his testimony, Duelfer
seemed to endorse the invasion , saying, "I have to agree — analytically
— the world is better off" with Hussein out of power.
Duelfer
also said that as a result of Hussein's steady efforts, it appeared that U.N.
sanctions "were in free fall" by 2001 and that Hussein was breaking them with
impunity.
Duelfer's report, which one intelligence official called a
cross between "a homicide investigation and a doctoral dissertation," in many
ways echoed and amplified Kay's preliminary findings. In January, Kay stunned
the White House and the CIA when he announced that "we were almost all wrong"
about Iraq's weapons.
But the new report also provides fresh evidence
of misjudgments by U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies that warned
before the war that Baghdad was secretly stockpiling nerve gases and germ
weapons, and was secretly reconstituting its nuclear program.
Duelfer
determined that the nuclear effort had been abandoned after the 1991 war and
that Iraq's ability to reconstitute the program "progressively decayed after
that date." Duelfer found "a limited number" of activities from the last few
years that might have "aided" a new nuclear program, including travel curbs and
pay raises for Iraq's corps of nuclear scientists to keep them from
emigrating.
"Over time, Hussein was getting further away from a nuclear
program, not closer," said a U.S. official who briefed reporters on the report
on condition he not be identified. "In point of fact, he was much further away
from a nuclear program in 2003 than he was in 1991."
U.S.
intelligence about Hussein's military also was wrong. Although Pentagon
officials warned at the outset of the war that Iraq's army would use chemical
weapons if U.S. forces crossed a "red line" around Baghdad, Duelfer said no
such plan was found to exist.
Duelfer's report also challenged or
downplayed previous claims — by Kay and Duelfer — that suggested
Hussein had a secret weapons program underway.
In Senate testimony in
March aft er he took over the survey group, for example, Duelfer said that a
series of small biological laboratories run by the Mukhabarat, Iraq's security
service, could have been used to produce bio-warfare agents.
But the
official who briefed reporters said that further investigation showed the labs
were not for military purposes.
"It appears they were producing small
amounts of poison, but they were not for military weapons," the official said.
He said it appeared that the labs were designed to produce toxins such as ricin
to use in assassinations, not as weapons of mass destruction.
Duelfer
also rejected administration claims that two truck trailers seized in Iraq after
the war were designed to produce germ weapons. This year, Vice President Dick
Cheney described the trucks as "conclusive" proof of Iraq's illicit
weapons.
"Those are clearly, in my judgment, for the production of
hydrogen," Duelfer said. "They have nothing to do with biological weapons."
The intelligence on the mobi le facilities was mostly from an Iraqi defector
code-named "Curveball" who had "turned out to be largely a fabricator," Duelfer
said.
Duelfer will return to Baghdad and the Iraq Survey Group will
continue investigating several unresolved issues, he said, including study of a
"new influx" of millions of pages of documents. The survey group has more than
700 Arabic translators examining the material at a military base in
Qatar.
But Duelfer said he believed there was a "less than 5% chance"
that a weapons stockpile would be found or that the picture of the prewar arms
program would change significantly. Duelfer did not say how long he expected
the search team to remain active, but said the remaining work "is a much
diminished task and requirement."
After interrogating Hussein and
several of his top lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that some of Hussein's
decisions about weapons programs were never put on paper, or even clearly
stated.
Some of the dictator's aides said their surviva l depended in
part on "having a sense" of what he wanted, even if he never said so. They said
they understood his long-term plans to rebuild weapons "from their long
association" with him and his "infrequent, but firm, verbal comments" to them,
the report says.
Several lawmakers expressed anger that the weapons
search was still going forward. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) complained
that the effort had so far cost $900 million.
"Why does the search
keep going on and on?" he asked. "Aren't we at the point where we have to
admit the stockpiles don't exist?"
Duelfer took issue with Kennedy's
comments.
"My task was not to find weapons of mass destruction, my task
was to find the truth," Duelfer shot back, noting that "we've had a couple
people die" in the effort. "I think it was a worthwhile endeavor."
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