Report concludes no WMD in Iraq

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Eigenlijk oud nieuws, maar toch....
Er blijft zo wel erg weinig over van argumenten om in Irak
om wat voor reden dan ook aanwezig te zijn.

"
Report concludes no WMD in Iraq

The group hunting for banned weapons inside post-war Iraq is
set to report that it has found no chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons.

But the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) will assert that Saddam
Hussein had plans to start producing weapons in defiance of
UN sanctions, US officials say.

US President George W Bush has again defended last year's
invasion of Iraq.

He said the risk of Saddam Hussein passing WMD to terror
groups was "a risk we could not afford to take".

Addressing supporters in Pennsylvania, Mr Bush said that
after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US had to look for
sources of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) available to
terrorists.

"We had to take a hard look at every place where terrorists
might get those weapons," he said.

"One regime stood out. The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein."

Before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush
administration cited WMD as the main reason for overthrowing
the Iraqi regime, asserting that Saddam Hussein posed a
serious and immediate threat.

But later on Wednesday, chief weapons inspector Charles
Duelfer is expected to tell the Senate Armed Services
Committee that Iraq did not possess WMD at the time of the
invasion.

That verdict has been widely anticipated since the former
head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned in January, and
following the leaking of a draft copy of the report last month.

'Clandestine schemes'

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the report would
show that Saddam Hussein posed a more serious threat than
had previously been imagined.

Speaking in Baghdad, Mr Straw said "the threat from Saddam
Hussein in terms of his intentions" was "even starker than
we have seen before".

[ HAVE YOUR SAY
Saddam Hussein may be guilty of a number of dreadful things,
but thought crime - is this a new legal precedent?
Cameron Haig, New York Saddam Hussein would have built up
his WMDs had he been left in power, Mr Straw added. ]

His comments were backed by Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister,
Barhem Saleh, who said anyone who doubted that Saddam
Hussein had WMDs only needed to visit Halabja - where the
former Iraq dictator gassed thousands of Kurds.

"We know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He used
them," Dr Saleh said, adding that in his view Saddam Hussein
was himself a weapon of mass destruction.

'Definitive'

US government officials told the New York Times the report
would include new evidence that Saddam Hussein had plans to
break UN-imposed sanctions and renew the production of
banned weapons.

The officials, speaking anonymously, said the report would
detail efforts by Iraq to bypass sanctions while they were
still in place, and to undermine international support for them.

Those efforts were reported to include the use of
clandestine laboratories to manufacture small quantities of
chemical and biological weapons for use in assassinations.

BBC Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs says the report,
which runs to more than 1,000 pages, is being billed as the
most definitive account yet of Iraq's weapons programmes.

Our correspondent says that with the political stakes in the
US so high and Iraq so central to the debate, Republican and
Democratic camps in the presidential race will seize on the
different elements of the report to argue that it bolsters
their case for or against the Iraq war.

However, the document will stop short of offering a final
judgement about the situation before the war.

Instead, the ISG is expected to continue translating and
evaluating an estimated 10,000 boxes of documents seized in
Iraq.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3718150.stm

Published: 2004/10/06 15:37:41 GMT

© BBC MMIV
"

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