Saddam didn't lie; there are no WMDs, UN inspectors say

The revelations undercut the rationale for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was predicated on the country's possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq's 12,000-page dossier on the subject, presented to the Security Council on Dec. 7 last year, was universally dismissed as incomplete and misleading.

Those charges were later used by Washington and London to justify the invasion of Iraq in late March.

Speaking on CNN, Hans Blix said the facts presented by Iraq in the dossier may have been accurate. "With this long period, I'm inclined to think that the Iraqi statement that they destroyed all the biological and chemical weapons, which they had in the summer of 1991, may well be the truth," he said.

The retired Swedish diplomat, who headed the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission for Iraq, has become increasingly outspoken since stepping down from his post.

His inspectors worked in Iraq for 3 1/2 months in late 2002 and early 2003 and "did not find any smoking gun." This was a disappointment to senior U.S. officials, including Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor.

"They would have hoped and they would have been happy to see if we had said, 'Here Iraq has violated, here they have, here is the smoking gun. We have found it," Mr. Blix said.

"And when we didn't do that, well, then they were disappointed and then they overinterpreted their own intelligence."

U.S. and British experts searching in Iraq since Saddam's fall have yet to turn up any of the weapons, he noted. "I cannot fail to notice that some of the things that they expected us to see, that they have turned out not to be real weapons of mass destruction."

Other weapons inspectors suggest the "unaccountables" may have been no more than incomplete paperwork that failed to note destruction of banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

Some may represent miscounts, while others could stem from employees' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s.

"Under that sort of regime, you don't admit you got it wrong," Ron Manley of Britain, a former chief UN advisor on chemical weapons, said on the weekend.

His encounters with Iraqi scientists in the 1990s convinced him that when they were told to produce a certain amount of a weapons agent, "they wrote down what their superiors wanted to hear, instead of the reality."

A U.S. investigative team headed by top Central Intelligence Agency weapons analyst David Kay is to present its preliminary findings later this month.

But U.S. officials indicate it may fail to produce any "smoking gun" as well. Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, who met with Mr. Kay during his visit to Iraq last week, sought to dampen expectations, telling reporters afterward, "I'm assuming he would tell me if he had gotten something."

In Vienna, a leaked report by Mohammed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency chief, says UN inspectors found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build weapons.

It reiterates that UN experts uncovered no signs of nuclear-weapons production before they withdrew from Iraq, just before the war began in March.

"In the areas of uranium acquisition, concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities," Mr. ElBaradei says in the report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

"No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq."

The IAEA's 35-nation board of governors is due to review the report this week during a meeting in Vienna.

Because the IAEA teams had to pull out before they could complete their inspections, the agency cannot say conclusively Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program. But what the inspectors saw in the months preceding their withdrawal suggested the Iraqis were in no position to build a nuclear weapon, Mr. ElBaradei said.

"The agency observed a substantial degradation in facilities, financial resources and programs throughout Iraq that might support a nuclear infrastructure," he said.

"The former cadre of nuclear experts was being increasingly dispersed and many key figures were reaching retirement or had left the country."



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