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For years, the media and Democrats have sold the public an understanding that Gerorge W. Bush fabricated a story that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program in order to justify invading Iraq, which invasion then becomes "based on a lie." About 550 metric tons of yellowcake concentrated uranium were recently shipped out of Iraq. It had been part of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program. That much was recently reported by the Associated Press . I wrote an article for American Thinker that commented on that story the day it appeared. That yellowcake stockpile pre-dated 1991, and had been under the UN's...

Tape recordings released over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program at least as recently as 2000 - but the press has decided the bombshell development isn't newsworthy. Speaking at the Intelligence Group Summit in Arlington, Va., Saddam tapes translator Bill Tierney revealed that in one recorded conversation, the Iraqi dictator can be heard discussing a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation. Though U.S. weapons inspectors found that 1.8 tons of Saddam's 500 ton uranium stockpile had been partially enriched, they failed to turn up any evidence of an ongoing...

For almost three years, the conventional wisdom regarding Iraq WMD’s prior to our invasion was that Saddam never had them, we knew it, Bush lied, and we invaded anyway because we wanted their oil, or to establish military bases, or because George Bush is a meany, or because the Jews told us to, or…just because America is eeeevil and we like to throw our weight around just to remind the Europeans of that fact every once and while. I pretty much accepted this CW - well, not all that other stuff but certainly the analysis that Saddam did not have...

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says. The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect. The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."

NEW YORK — The scandal engulfing the United Nations Procurement Department () now appears to be bottomless. It also shows signs of growing more sinister, especially where it involves a mysterious private company called IHC Services (), which did big business with the procurement department until it was removed from U.N. rosters in June. New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam...

In reviewing the career of French diplomat Jean-Bernard Mérimée, two key moments stand out. In June 1995, Mr. Mérimée, then France's ambassador to the U.N., announced he was largely satisfied with the progress Iraq had made on disarmament and wanted sanctions lifted sooner rather than later. And this week, a French investigative magistrate brought Mr. Mérimée in for questioning on an allegation that he took a bribe from Saddam in the form of 11 million barrels of oil. So now we know what French officialdom means by the word "multilateralism": One part involves speechifying about the need for international "consensus"...

NEW YORK — As investigations proliferate into the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, one of the more intriguing mysteries involves a former French diplomat with a direct link to the U.N.’s executive suite: Jean-Bernard Merimee (search). The 68-year-old Merimee, one of several individuals now under investigation in France for alleged involvement in Saddam Hussein’s Oil-for-Food scams, is well known for his role in the early 1990s as French ambassador to the United Nations. What investigators have not so far highlighted is that during the period Merimee is alleged to have come into commercial contact with Saddam’s regime, starting in December 2001,...

It pains me to be hard on Charles Duelfer. A smart and dedicated civil servant with vast experience in Iraq, he at least had an understandable reason for wrapping up his investigation into Iraq’s WMD programs: Osama bin Laden’s man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was trying to blow him up. Dr. Duelfer told London’s Independent in April of this year that a car bomb set by Zarqawi’s men “tried to get me and my follow car. Two of my guards were killed and one was badly wounded. My hearing's not been right since." This was the unofficial reason that...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Saddam Hussein may have "created a certain ambiguity" about his weapons capabilities before the second Gulf War for two reasons: pride and the threat of Iran, the former top U.S. arms hunter said Tuesday. Charles Duelfer told the Council on Foreign Relations that it was easy for the U.S. government to misinterpret Saddam's actions, but the former dictator didn't necessarily have only Washington in mind when he shut U.N. inspectors out of weapons sites after 1998. That left the world to wonder whether he was rebuilding his banned weapons programs. "There was a greater concern than...

Saddam Hussein's government provided senior Russian officials with oil rights worth millions of dollars under the oil-for-food program in an effort to lift U.N. sanctions against Iraq, according to a U.S. Senate Committee report released on Monday. The oil allocations were "compensation for support," Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The report, based on documents as well as interviews with Ramadan and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, pointed to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Presidential Council, and ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Both men had...

Terrorists dispatched by al-Qaida ringleader Abu Musab al Zarqawi attacked Iraq Survey Group chief Charles Duelfer and killed two of his bodyguards, Duelfer tells U.K.'s Independent newspaper. "A car bomb tried to get me and my follow car," Duelfer revealed Thursday. "Two of my guards were killed and one was badly wounded." "My hearing's not been right since," the top weapons searcher added. In an addendum to his report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was released this week, Duelfer notes: "The Iraq Survey Group lost two more brave individuals in a suicide car bomb attack. SFC Clinton Wisdom...

The Washington Timeswww.washingtontimes.com Misreporting the Duelfer report, againPublished April 28, 2005 The mainstream media is playing another misbegotten round of "gotcha" with President Bush on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This week, the CIA issued a follow-up to its October 2004 Iraqi Survey Group report, saying its investigations into possible WMD transfers from Iraq to Syria before the war were inconclusive and warranted further investigation. Predictably, the media did not convey that message. Instead, it cherry-picked the findings.     "Report Finds No Evidence Syria Hid Arms," The Washington Post's headline blared. Actually, the report, by the CIA's chief weapons inspector,...

Iraq Survey Group Chief Charles Duelfer announced Tuesday that his team had uncovered "a large collection" of tape recordings of Saddam Hussein as he chaired top secret military meetings - evidence that could prove once and for all whether the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. attacked in March 2003. In an addendum to his WMD report that was released this week, Duelfer revealed: "A substantial effort continues to examine the documents that have been recovered from the former Regime. . . . For example, a large collection of audiotapes from Revolutionary Command Council meetings chaired...

WASHINGTON, March 28 - The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary. The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies. Those recommendations are...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery...

The Washington Post yesterday said a quotation used in its lead Page One headline in Thursday's paper -- that the United States got it "almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- was not new and was incorrectly attributed to the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq. In an article on Thursday, The Post identified Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush administration picked to complete a U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons programs, as the source of that remark. The dispatch by Dana Priest and Walter Pincus reported that Mr. Duelfer, chairman of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group,...

I took some time the other day and cut/paste pics from the Duelfer Report that show examples of how Saddam easily could have complied with the inspection process for 12yrs, but CLEARLY chose not to. I also converted the pics to jpgs, but don't know how to post them here, so I put them on my own site. I think they're important to view since they show in no uncertain terms that Saddam's Iraq was a WMD threat despite a lack of stockpiles. I think they also encourage people to actually sit down and at least flip through the Duelfer...

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERSFROM: DANIEL MCKIVERGAN, Deputy DirectorSUBJECT: Duelfer, the UN, and the New York Times Yesterday, the Washington Post reported ("Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month") that the conclusions reached in Charles Duelfer's September 2004 report on Iraq's weapons programs will be the "final word" on the subject. The New York Times editorial board weighed in today. The Times notes that what the "Iraqi invasion has actually proved is that the weapons inspection worked, that international sanctions - deeply, deeply messy as they turned out to be - worked, and that in the case of Saddam...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. inspectors have ended their search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in recent weeks, a U.S. intelligence official told CNN. The search ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and may have hidden weapons stockpiles. Members of the Iraq Survey Group were continuing to examine hundreds of documents and would investigate any new leads, the official said.

Last week certainly was instructive about the epic... United Nations Oil for Food program. First came Monday's hearings in Norm Coleman's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations where we learned that Saddam Hussein gamed the program for twice as much unmonitored revenue as previously thought -- $21.3 billion, up from $10 billion. Also fascinating was chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer's testimony that he believes, based on what high-level Iraqi sources have told him, that U.N. Oil for Food director Benon Sevan did in fact profit from Iraqi oil vouchers. Mr. Sevan continues to deny the allegation. Then on Wednesday Henry Hyde's House...

NEW YORK (AP) - Saddam Hussein diverted money from the U.N. oil-for-food program to pay millions of dollars to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who carried out attacks on Israel, say congressional investigators who uncovered evidence of the money trail. The former Iraqi president tapped secret bank accounts in Jordan - where he collected bribes from foreign companies and individuals doing illicit business under the humanitarian program - to reward the families up to $25,000 each, investigators told The Associated Press. Documents prepared for a Wednesday hearing by the House International Relations Committee outline the new findings about how Saddam...

C-Span now showing the Oil For Food Scandal with Congress members.

...Iraq's top customer was Russia, whose firms bought $19.2 billion worth of Iraq oil and exported $3.3 billion in humanitarian goods. Fellow Security Council member France was a distant but significant second, at $4.4 billion and $2.9 billion respectively. China is also high on the list. Oil voucher recipients are alleged to include the Russian presidential office, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, and even former Oil for Food program director Benon Sevan of the U.N.... Against this backdrop, it is impossible to take Secretary-General Annan seriously when he calls it "inconceivable" that this could have affected the Security Council's...

This report relays the findings of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. We are aware that the files comprising this 1,000-page report are extremely large and, in practice, available only to visitors who have a broadband connection to our site. Thus, we extracted the key findings from each of the major sections of the report and provide them as a separate, much smaller file. All of the files linked below are in PDF format and require Adobe's free Acrobat® Reader™ to view. We plan to post an HTML version of the...

October 27, 2004 Edition > Section: Foreign Printer-friendly version Email this article Urgent Warning on Iraqi Cache Issued in 1995 BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun October 27, 2004 WASHINGTON - Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq's interim government said this month was looted due to poor security. The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the...

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq's interim government said this month was looted due to poor security. The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations' atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing. Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced...

I found the entire testimony from the day he released the FINAL ISG report on Iraq's WMD. I cut it down so people could see the more important and unique facets of their conversations in the Senate. Interesting. Someone might wanna forward this to the Kerry Campaign so they realize that: sanctions never would have worked inspections never would have worked diplomacy had been bought by Saddam and never would have worked and that the "allies" JFK raves about were never gonna come and send their sons to die in "the wrong war" so that American troops could cut and...

PARIS (Reuters) - Paris will deliver confidential documents to U.N. investigators to refute charges in a report published on a CIA (news - web sites) Web site that French firms abused the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq (news - web sites), officials said on Monday. The report by a former U.N. weapons inspector implicated leading French companies and politicians in a strategy by Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to bribe his way clear of U.N. sanctions. Officials said Paris protested in vain to Washington over the Oct. 7 report by Charles Duelfer, whose CIA-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) found...

(AP) - Arms hunter Charles Duelfer's report, in concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building "after sanctions were removed," left out the crucial fact that the U.N. Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, U.N. officials say. The council, led by the United States, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring. "It's been a little disturbing," said Demetrius Perricos, chief U.N. weapons inspector. "All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so." In...

NEW YORK (AP) - Interviews with dozens of former and current Iraqi officials by congressional investigators have produced new evidence that Saddam Hussein micro-managed business deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program to maximize political influence with important foreign governments like Russia and neighboring Arab states. The Iraqi officials, who were flown outside of Iraq for their own safety during the interviews, provided a list of foreign companies favored by Saddam and his top lieutenants for import contracts under the U.N. program. They also revealed a parallel blacklist of companies that the then-Iraq leader disqualified from getting deals, investigators told The...

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s latest interview with British television, in which he dismissed the serious allegations of Oil-for-Food improprieties raised in the Duelfer Report, undermines his credibility and impartiality with regard to the Oil-for-Food investigation. [1] Moreover, Annan’s remarks reinforce concerns over his own failure of leadership relating to the U.N.’s administration of the Oil-for-Food program and cast serious doubt over his suitability to remain in office while the scandal is investigated. In addition, Annan’s controversial statements regarding the Iraq war have further undermined his supposedly neutral position as the world’s most senior servant of the international community. Annan should...

...In Iraq, John Kerry — who used to say that Saddam Hussein posed a genuine threat to America because he surely possessed weapons of mass destruction — would have imposed a "global test" before committing forces to protect U.S. security... [H]e would not be prepared to act until nations like France and Germany gave the go-ahead. Indeed, he stresses the infinite value of conversation — calling for "a summit of all our allies," much as he once begged the first President Bush to send someone to Baghdad in the firm belief that Saddam Hussein could be talked out of Kuwait....

...[Kerry] and other nouveau antiwarriors... have quickly seized on the conclusion that there are no WMDs in Iraq from the 1,000-page postmortem completed last month for the CIA by Charles Duelfer.... [W]hile Saddam was playing hide-and-seek with the U.N. over whether he had WMDs, his stealthy little spooks were focusing their efforts on weapons specifically designed for use by terrorists. Could it thus be said that Saddam was himself plotting foreign terrorism? Or at least that his secret service had something going along those lines while he was busy corrupting the U.N. oil-for-food program and bribing French and Russian politicians...

The big news is that the U.N. has flunked "the global test." And as big as it is, it's a story that isn't likely to find its way into the newspaper that trumpets "All the news that's fit to print" in the upper left corner of its front page every day. To find that "the global community" is made up of a bunch of crooks, that "the global test" is a racket, and that John Kerry is either utterly naïve or in cahoots with these global con artists is something that's just too unfit to think about, let alone broadcast...

The big news is that the UN has flunked “the global test.” And as big as it is, it’s a story that isn’t likely to find its way into the newspaper that trumpets “All the news that’s fit to print” in the upper left corner of its front page every day. To find that “the global community” is made up of a bunch of crooks, that “the global test” is a racket, and that John Kerry is either utterly naïve or in cahoots with these global con artists is something that's just too unfit to think about, let alone broadcast...

When you read the words "United Nations," what comes into your mind? Perhaps it's an august phrase, such as "international community," or a lofty image, such as the blue U.N. seal. In the first presidential debate, President Bush spoke of "going to the United Nations" as if it were a tiresome relative. ("I didn't need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations. I decided to go there myself.") Sen. John Kerry often talks about the United Nations as if it were a forgotten American ally. Yet the United Nations is not a person, or an ally, or...

Oil-for-Food Scandal Key to CIA Report Monday The U.N. Oil-for-Food program — already the subject of federal, congressional and United Nations financial abuse probes — took a fresh hit with an explosive new report that said Saddam Hussein was using the program to fund his ambitions. The report looking into whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction — found that Saddam was able to "subvert" the $60 billion U.N. program to generate an estimated $1.7 billion in revenue outside U.N. control from 1997-2003. In light of the report, FOX News presents another hour-long special investigating the biggest financial scam in...

Saturday, October 16, 2004 GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF Duelfer: 'A lot of material left Iraq and went to Syria' Iraq Survey Group head does not rule out Saddam's transfer of WMD -------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 16, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern 2004 WorldNetDaily.com At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Oct. 6, Charles Duelfer, an adviser to the CIA, did not rule out Saddam's transfer of Iraqi missiles and weapons of mass destruction to Syria, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service. Duelfer agreed that a large amount of material had been transferred by Iraq to Syria before the March 2003 war. "A...

Duelfer: 'A lot of material left Iraq and went to Syria' Iraq Survey Group head does not rule out Saddam's transfer of WMD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 16, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern Editor's note: WorldNetDaily brings readers exclusive, up-to-the-minute global intelligence news and analysis from Geostrategy-Direct, a new online newsletter edited by veteran journalist Robert Morton and featuring the "Backgrounder" column compiled by Bill Gertz. Geostrategy-Direct is a subscription-based service produced by the publishers of WorldTribune.com, a free news service frequently linked by the editors of WorldNetDaily. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Oct. 6, Charles...

GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF Duelfer: 'A lot of material left Iraq and went to Syria' Posted: October 16, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Oct. 6, Charles Duelfer, an adviser to the CIA, did not rule out Saddam's transfer of Iraqi missiles and weapons of mass destruction to Syria, reports Geostrategy-Direct, the global intelligence news service. Duelfer agreed that a large amount of material had been transferred by Iraq to Syria before the March 2003 war. "A lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria," Duelfer said. "There was certainly a lot of traffic across...

As I was perusing the Duelfer report I found this timeline chart very interesting in understanding what happened when and who did what. And since some may not have seen the report I took the time to make this up. I've bolded a few things but other than that, and my finial addition, this is taken directly from V1 pdf page 435 of the Duelfer report. Please feel free to comment on things noted here or add additional information that fits in this timeline concerning the ramp up to OIF and what Nations in the UN were doing to work...

After the release of the Iraq Survey Group's Duelfer report, the headlines blazed "No WMD Found." ...This reflects the notion that Iraq was only a threat if it had military munitions filled with WMD. The claim "Iraq was not an imminent threat" was also expounded by pundits that seemingly crawled out of the woodwork as well as those opposed to President Bush. But have these individuals read carefully the report...? While no facilities were found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, many clandestine laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services were found to be engaged in small-scale...

Would we have gone into Iraq had we known what he know today about the state of Saddam Hussein's programs for the production of weapons of mass destruction? The Bush White House has been unapologetic about its policy, and according to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, speaking on Fox News Channel on Sunday, the answer is "yes." But the point is of course that we didn't know. Saddam Hussein's truly moronic game of deception made it very hard to think otherwise than that he had all sorts of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Howard Dean must have been ecstatic as he read the headlines on Oct. 7: "Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat" affirmed the Washington Post, while The New York Times, not to be outdone, jubilantly proclaimed that "sanctions worked." The Yale dining halls were abuzz with liberal energy: I could scarcely walk to my table without hearing about "how we had contained Saddam" or how "we never should have invaded Iraq." Democrats were vindicated, Republicans were doomed; with this newfound evidence, John Kerry could "finish Bush off" while the current administration would "lose all remaining credibility." Naturally, I was a bit taken...

Law-enforcement sources say Americans who participated in alleged oil-for-food scams also may face further investigation. The CIA deleted from Duelfer's report names of Saddam's U.S. oil-for-food favorites. But an uncensored copy of the Duelfer report obtained by NEWSWEEK indicates Houston oil mogul Oscar Wyatt got oil allocations from Saddam which could have earned him and Coastal Corp.—a company he founded and ran until 2000—profits of more than $22 million. Wyatt and wife Lynn are major donors to political causes: since 1989 they have given nearly $700,000 in contributions, of which more than $500,000 went to Democrats. Wyatt told NEWSWEEK that...

As Saddam Hussein pressed the United Nations oil-for-food relief program for more money that he used to buy banned weapons, an unwitting ally may have been the American driver. Almost until the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, American oil companies were among the largest purchasers of Iraqi crude oil. The role that the companies, including ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, played in the oil-for-food program is now coming under greater scrutiny in the wake of a report by the chief arms inspector for the Central Intelligence Agency that disclosed how extensively Mr. Hussein was abusing profits from the...

DEBATE 2:Bush KOs Kerry (The Lethal Danger of Kerry-Edwards + Old Media)POURQUOI JOHN KERRY EST DANGEREUX POUR L'AMÉRIQUE by Mia T, 10.10.04 (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)  BUSH:[G]oing into Iraq... was the right decision. The Duelfer report confirmed that decision today, because what Saddam Hussein was doing was trying to get rid of sanctions so he could reconstitute a weapons program. And the biggest threat facing America is terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. We knew he hated us. We knew he'd been -- invaded other countries. We knew he tortured his own people.   KERRY:I...

CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer may not have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he sure found information enough to blow the lid off the simmering scandal of the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. As it turns out, Oil-for-Food pretty much was Saddam Hussein's weapons program. As Duelfer documents, Oil-for-Food allowed Saddam to replenish his empty coffers, firm up his networks for hiding money and buying arms, corrupt the U.N.'s own debates over Iraq, greatly erode sanctions and deliberately prep the ground for further rearming, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons. *************** The report notes that the start...

Sordid affairIT'S PROBABLY wishful thinking to expect - in the home stretch of an overheated U.S. presidential election race - very much reasoned debate on the final report of the top U.S. arms inspector concerning Saddam Hussein's regime and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Predictably, some have seized on Charles Duelfer's findings, delivered last week, that Saddam had no stockpiles of WMDs and no active capability to reconstitute those weapons programs, to argue that the U.S.-led invasion was therefore wrong since Iraq posed no threat to the world. Others have pointed out, however, that the same report concludes...

For years, Saddam Hussein showed himself to be a master practitioner of the big bluff. Everyone outside Iraq and just about everyone inside believed that he harbored a secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.[snip]Saddam made a calculated decision, says the [Duelfer] report, that getting out from under sanctions was of paramount importance. He opted for a "tactical retreat" by ordering the elimination of what he had left: all biological, chemical and nuclear programs were abandoned, stockpiles destroyed.But according to the report, former officials say they "heard him say or inferred" that he "intended to resume" developing his chemical- and...