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Bush Suggests Iraq Destroyed Weapons
Apr 25, 2003
Source: Washington Post

President Bush today raised the possibility that Saddam Hussein's government destroyed the prohibited chemical and biological weapons that were the justification for the United States invasion of Iraq.

The president made the suggestion at a celebratory event at the plant here that makes Abrams tanks, 900 of which have been used in the Iraq war. Addressing concerns about anarchy in Iraq and the absence so far of forbidden weapons, he urged patience on both counts while the U.S. troops try to disarm and stabilize the country of 23 million.

"It's going to take time to find them," Bush said of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Speaking before hundreds of cheering workers, an enormous U.S. flag and five tanks with guns pointed skyward, he added: "But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."

It was the first hint by Bush that U.S. troops and others hunting for weapons might fail to find chemical and biological arms. The administration had laid out in detail what it called an irrefutable case that Iraq possessed such weapons. Failure to find significant quantities of the weapons could be an embarrassment for the U.S. position.

Bush also said it would take time to rebuild the country. "Iraq is recovering not just from weeks of conflict, but from decades of totalitarian rule," he said. "Statues of the man have been pulled down, but the fear and suspicion he instilled in the people will take longer to pass away."

Bush noted that retired Gen. Jay Garner, who is overseeing Iraqi rebuilding, "arrived in Baghdad just this week. You see, it wasn't all that long ago that our tanks were in Baghdad. It may seem like a lot of time -- there's a lot on our TV screens -- but it wasn't all that long ago that the people got the first whiff of freedom."

Bush's call for patience came as other senior administration officials spoke of U.S. plans for Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in an interview with the Associated Press that the administration would not tolerate "an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything."

On the subject of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, administration officials have regularly expressed confidence that Hussein's weapons would be found, and found quickly. Bush's remarks today were more pessimistic. He noted that Iraqis with knowledge of the programs "have come forward recently, some voluntarily, others not," to "let us know what the facts were on the ground." While expressing no certainty about Iraq's weapons, Bush said that "one thing is for certain: Saddam Hussein no longer threatens America with weapons of mass destruction."

In an interview today with NBC's Tom Brokaw, Bush said there was "some evidence" suggesting Hussein is dead. "The person who helped direct the attacks believes that Saddam at the very minimum was severely wounded," Bush said. But he added, "We would never make that declaration until we are more certain."

Launching the war, Bush saidn that "the people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." In the months before the war, the administration said that Iraq had not accounted for 25,000 liters of anthrax; 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent; and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents.

The administration was also highly critical of U.N. inspectors for failing to find the evidence. But in the war and its aftermath, U.S. troops and weapons hunters have failed to make a confirmed finding of forbidden weapons, even as they have uncovered tantalizing clues.

The official purpose of Bush's visit to Ohio today was to build support for a tax cut of at least $550 billion and to put pressure on Sen. George V. Voinovich of Ohio, a Republican holdout. In a speech at a manufacturing facility in Canton this morning, he taunted the Senate for supporting a "little-bitty tax cut" of $350 billion instead of the "robust package" he proposed.

But Bush's afternoon event here in western Ohio became something of a celebration of the yet-undeclared victory in Iraq. He boasted that the "deck of cards," on which the Pentagon featured Iraq's most-wanted former leaders, "seems to be getting complete over time." Bush at one point stood on two of the tanks in the factory.

"We're witnessing historic days in the cause of freedom," Bush almost shouted. Describing Hussein's swift ouster, he said: "The tanks built right here in Lima, Ohio, charged through elements of the dictator's Republican Guards, led the forces of a liberation into the heart of Iraq, and rolled all the way into downtown Baghdad."

Bush said that "our forces still face danger in Iraq," but he put the anti-U.S. protests there in a favorable light. "Today, in Iraq, there's discussion, debate, protest, all the hallmarks of liberty," he said to chuckles. "The path to freedom may not always be neat and orderly, but it is the right of every person and every nation." Paraphrasing Lincoln, he said America "will help that nation build a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 104261.DTL

No proof of Powell's arms claims
U.S. empty-handed in Iraq search for weapons of mass destruction
Walter Pincus, Washington Post
Saturday, April 26, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

Washington -- The United States has yet to find weapons of mass destruction at any of the locations that Secretary of State Colin Powell cited in his key presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February, according to U.S. officials.

Powell's speech on Feb. 5 signaled the end of the Bush administration's support of continued U.N. weapons inspections and set the stage for military action by providing information that he said showed Iraq was in continued violation of Security Council resolutions that required it to disarm.

He told the council he was sharing "what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism."

In the 38 days since U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, however, military forces have yet to produce any of the weaponry or chemical or biological agents Powell described, nor have they produced Iraqi scientists with evidence about them, officials said.

They also have not turned up anything to support Powell's claim to the Security Council that "nearly two dozen" al Qaeda terrorists lived in and operated from Baghdad.

U.S. Central Command has dispatched special units to search sites where U.S. intelligence agencies said it was highly probable that proscribed weapons would be found. There have been several early published reports from these teams about possible weapons or chemical finds, but each has been discounted.

"First reports from the field are almost always incorrect," a senior Defense Department intelligence official said. "Second reports generally compound the problem, and only with the third report do we start to begin to make some sense out of (the find)."

"We are being enormously careful," this senior aide said, recognizing how important it will be to be accurate in showing that Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction.

One of Powell's most dramatic disclosures was that while the Security Council was debating a resolution authorizing renewed weapons inspections last November, the United States "knew from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents . . . to various locations in western Iraq."

None of those weapons has been found, a senior administration official said Friday. Searches have been conducted in western Iraq without any successes.

U.S. forces attacked the missile brigade along with Iraqi Special Republican Guard units that Bush administration officials told reporters in the weeks before the war had received chemical weapons. "We don't know where those people are," the official said, but added that U.S. military personnel in Iraq may be looking for them.

Another part of Powell's presentation focused on an electronic intercept of a conversation between two Republican Guard Corps commanders. They were talking to each other "just a few weeks ago," Powell said, and discussed removing the expression "nerve agents wherever it comes up" in anticipation of U.N. inspectors' arrival.

U.S. intelligence knew the locations of the two commanders and probably their names. "We don't know where they are," one official said Friday.

Powell detailed Iraq's use of mobile laboratories to produce chemical or biological weapons as a way of avoiding discovery and displayed diagrams of their interiors. The information came from an Iraqi chemical engineer who'd seen one of them and witnessed an accident in which 12 technicians died from exposure to biological agents.

This defector, and three others, presented independent information, Powell said, that proved Iraq had "at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories" and that each of the truck-mounted factories had at least two or three trucks each.

None of the truck laboratories has been discovered, and none of the defectors has come forward.

Powell and administration spokesmen repeatedly emphasized that Iraq possessed large stocks of chemical and perhaps biological weapons, but those claims were primarily based on weapons and chemical and biological agents that Baghdad had declared it had in 1991, when U.N. inspection teams first began work in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War.

By 1998, those U.N. inspectors, working from Iraq's declarations, supervised or had evidence of destruction of some 80,000 weapons and tons of chemical precursors. But Baghdad hadn't been able to prove they'd unilaterally destroyed some 550 artillery shells containing mustard gas, 30,000 empty munitions that could be filled with chemical agents, 6,500 bombs missing from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and possibly 25,000 liters of anthrax.

Powell told the Security Council about Iraqi scientists who were threatened with death if they told U.N. inspectors about weapons activities and "a dozen experts . . . placed under house arrest -- not in their own houses." That information came from human intelligence sources, a senior official said, but to date not one of those individuals has been produced.

"It's going to take time to find them," Bush said of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Isn't that what Hans Blix said, for which he was harshly criticized by the Bush Administration?

Ryan

I believe so...