[Maelstorm]

A very good post. I saw many pictures of weapons found and I’d even saw a few of barrels but nothing like this. I remember the reports of camouflaged barrels of chemicals found at airbases but interestingly enough no pictures surfaced. Why the Bush administration has been so horrible about dissemination of information. If they had never given up the ground on the WMDs and the justifications for going the war they wouldn’t be facing the kind of poll numbers they are now.

[jveritas]

The problem lies with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the politico/techno group that was tasked to find the WMD. Under heavy political pressure from liberals the group ended its mission very prematurely and concluded that there were no WMD. I read the ISG report on WMD so many times (very long report) and concluded that they looked in the wrong places for WMD. They looked for WMD in the Iraqi ammunition depots. Among hundreds of Saddam ammunitions depots they focused on 18 suspicious ones that may contain WMD and at the end they ended up thoroughly searching a handful.

In any way, Saddam was not that stupid to put his WMD in known ammunition depots because those are the first places the inspectors will be looking at.

Also the ISG never really worked to find out the more probable approach of Saddam Hussein toward WMD which was not to build the final Chemical Weapons products but rather build the Precursors to make the Chemical weapons as I explained in my earlier post.

Also the ISG heavily relied on Iraqi scientists for information about Iraq WMD. This was a huge mistake to do so. First because Saddam adopted some type of a Manhattan style project from 1998-2002 where people worked on some aspects of the WMD program without knowing what will be the final outcome of the whole project. Also per the ISG own admission in the report, they believe that the Iraqi scientists were not forthcoming because they were more afraid from ex-Baathists to take revenge against them than the American interrogators.