no WMD's
Bush & Powell & Tony, where are you?
U.S. Withdraws WMD Search Team From Iraq#
Bush is under a barrage of criticisms for shifting the
justification to simply human rights violations of Saddam (AFP)
WASHINGTON (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The United States
quietly withdrew from Iraq a 400-member military team after they
have found no weapons of mass destruction, as an American think-
tank said that the Bush administration “systematically
misrepresented” the danger of Iraq's allegedly-banned weapons,
press reports said on Thursday, January 8.
The task of the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group, made up
of technical experts headed by an unidentified Australian
brigadier, included searching weapons depots and other sites for
missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons.
“They picked up everything that was worth picking up,” one U.S.
official told the New York Times.
Some military officials described the step as a sign that the
administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected
to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the
White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last
March, the daily said.
A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical
and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey
Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at
a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, reported the Times.
David Kay, the head of the survey group, made it known last month
that he might leave his post as his team had yielded no weapons of
mass destruction, which President George W. Bush had cited as
justification for the invasion of Iraq.
“I am sure that if they had found important evidence, we would know
about it,” said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has said the
administration exaggerated the Iraqi threat.
The Washington Post on Wednesday said interviews with Iraqi
scientists and investigators indicate that Saddam's regime
concealed arms research that never went beyond the planning stage.
“The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date,” said
the Post, “suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess
the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the
scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War”.
The United States justified going to invade Iraq last year citing
a threat from Baghdad 's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
‘Systematically Misrepresented’
In another related development, a report from a U.S. think tank
said on Wednesday that the Bush administration
officials “systemically misrepresented” the danger of Iraq 's
allegedly weapons of mass destruction programs.
The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the
respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to
reignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-
invasion intelligence claims.
According to the report, carried by the Guardian, the absence of
any imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical or nuclear
programs was “knowable” before the invasion of the oil-rich
country.
There was greater uncertainty over biological weapons but no
evidence strong enough to justify the invasion, said the report.
The report concludes that “administration officials systematically
misrepresented the threat from Iraq 's WMD and ballistic missile
program”.
The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq 's capabilities
grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of
dissenting views by intelligence officials.
The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly
influenced by policymakers' views “sometime in 2002”.
Repeated visits to the CIA by the U.S. vice president, Dick Cheney,
and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports,
created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed
to come to “more threatening” judgments of Iraq.
The Bush administration has come under a barrage of criticisms from
members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who charged the
administration had "shifted justification" of the Iraq invasion
from alleged weapons of mass destruction to simply the human rights
violations of the ousted Saddam.
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