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One year ago I told the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had concluded "we were almost all wrong" at the time of the Iraq war about that country's activities with regard to weapons of mass destruction -- and never more wrong than in the assessment that Iraq had a resurgent program on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. I testified about what I saw as the major reasons we got it so wrong, and I urged the establishment of an independent commission to examine this failure and begin the long-overdue process of adjusting our intelligence capabilities to the new...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. weapons inspectors are planning for possible monitoring of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile programs despite being barred from the country by the United States, according to a report to the U.N. Security Council. The quarterly report released Wednesday by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, outlines a range of activities undertaken by the U.N. inspectors to seek new information about Iraq's weapons programs and to prepare for a possible future role. U.N. inspectors were pulled out of Iraq in March, just before the U.S.-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime. After the...

THIS WEEK two separate investigations have cleared President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of intentionally deceiving the world about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities. Yet those who have charged Bush and Blair with such duplicity have not even slowed the flow of accusations. In Britain, Lord Hutton, tasked with investigating the charge that Blair’s government had knowingly inserted false intelligence into its dossier on Iraq, concluded that the charge was entirely false. He found that the intelligence claim — that Iraq could launch a weapons of mass destruction attack within 45 minutes — came from Britain’s Secret...

Jack Kelly: The poison trail Iraq's labs posed a danger beyond the usual WMD Sunday, February 08, 2004 Analysis has confirmed that the suspicious white powder found in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist contained the deadly poison ricin. In January 2003, British police found traces of ricin in an apartment used by Algerians who were linked to the al-Qaida cell run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was operating out of Baghdad at the time. Iraq was working to weaponize ricin up until the U.S. invasion last March, David Kay's investigators in the Iraq Survey Group found....

Bush administration in denial about lack of Iraq WMD: Kay Thu Oct 7,12:07 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - President George W. Bush (news - web sites)'s administration is in denial over the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites) before the US-led invasion in 2003, ex-chief US arms inspector David Kay said. AFP/File Photo A report by the Iraq Survey Group that Kay ran until he quit at the start of the year found Iraq had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when Bush was saying that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)...

Is it really true that Saddam Hussein had no "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invaded in March 2003? Not exactly - at least not if one counts the 500 tons of uranium that the Iraqi dictator kept stored at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant. The press hasn't made much of Saddam's 500-ton uranium stockpile, downplaying the story to such an extent that most Americans aren't even aware of it. But it's been reported - albeit in a by-the-way fashion - by the New York Times and a handful of other media outlets. And one...

No weapons since 1991, this is a joke report. Noone believed this would have been possible in 2002. The UN I am convinced took the weapons out of Iraq to discredit Bush. He would not have risked his Presidency that he would have won easily if he knew there was no WMD.

Nuclear bomb-making material found in scrap - yellowcake uranium oxide. PHILADELPHIA -- Workers at a Dutch scrap metals company discovered a key ingredient for manufacturing nuclear bombs within a cargo of scrap steel bought from the Middle East. Dock sensors at the Jewometaal Stainless Processing BV facility in Rotterdam, Netherlands, helped workers locate a small canister containing uranium oxide, also known as "yellowcake," an essential ingredient for manufacturing nuclear warheads, according to the Associated Press. Scientists later confirmed that the material was indeed uranium oxide, which has no other use outside of bomb making. According to published reports, the discovery...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - A new report on Iraq's illicit weapons program is expected to conclude that Saddam Hussein's government had a clear intent to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons if United Nations sanctions were lifted, government officials said Thursday. But, like earlier reports, it finds no evidence that Iraq had begun any large-scale program for weapons production by the time of the American invasion last year, the officials said. The most specific evidence of an illicit weapons program, the officials said, has been uncovered in clandestine labs operated by the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which could have produced small...

MARY KAY STILL HOT FOR VILI By RICH CALDER and ERIN CALABRESE August 8, 2004 -- EXCLUSIVE Infamous cradle-robbing teacher Mary Kay Letourneau says she still lusts for her former schoolboy lover after all these years, a former student of hers said yesterday. *SNIP* Letourneau, 42, whose steamy sexcapades with a then-12-year-old Vili Fualaau produced two kids, was released from prison last week after 71/2 years. *SNIP* Letourneau began her taboo affair with Fualaau in 1996 when she was his sixth-grade teacher and a married mother of four. Their tryst was so torrid that they did the dirty deed in...

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group tasked with looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC's Daily Politics. The programme's presenter Andrew Neil says this is the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group's interim report, due to be published next month. Mr Neil said the report is also set to say it was highly unlikely that weapons were shipped out of the country before the US-led war on Iraq. He said it will also claim that Saddam Hussein mounted a huge programme to deceive and hinder...

Blix dismisses Blair's weapons claim Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has dismissed claims Saddam Hussein had laboratories for developing weapons of mass destruction. His comments came as Tony Blair said that the British-American Iraq Survey Group had already uncovered "massive" evidence of a network of secret laboratories. Mr Blair made the claim in an interview with the British Forces Broadcasting Service. He said: "I think in any event we have got to carry on the work that we are doing, because contrary to some of the things that appear, the Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence...

Mary Kay Letourneu to be released from prison in August The Associated Press Friday, July 02, 2004 - Page updated at 08:23 A.M. GIG HARBOR, Wash. - Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who had sex with her former sixth-grade student, is expected to be released from prison Aug. 4, rather than this month, according to the Washington Corrections Center for Women. Prison officials said earlier her release date was July 17, but state Corrections Department spokesman Veltry Johnson said Thursday that would have been the earliest possible date. The later date was set after a review of her transition plan....

The report offered new details about the al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship and the commission also backtracked somewhat from an earlier staff report, which found no evidence of a "collaborative relationship." In the final report, the phrase was modified to say, "no collaborative operational relationship." Adding the word "operational" was an important shift. The panel found no proof that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's organization worked together to attack their common enemy, the United States. But the commission did find that the two had frequent contacts and a fairly well-developed relationship. There were Iraq-al-Qaeda ties. Bush looked at the evidence of links...

"IRAQ is now at a setback, but it is temporary. We will rise up like mountains, standing firm, and we will protect all people regardless of religion, color and every other consideration. Pluralism should be a factor of progress, not divisiveness,' said Iraq's new interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi as he took office Monday morning. Difficult and bloody days are ahead, but this small victory provides a moment to pause and marvel at what U.S. troops, coalition troops and freedom-minded Iraqis were able to achieve despite the many factions that toiled so desperately for the new Iraq to fail. Physician...

King Abdullah: Al-Qaida WMDs Came From Syria Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. King Abdullah said...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"/> March 31, 2004 Iraq Arms Inspector Says Search Is a TangleBy DOUGLAS JEHL ASHINGTON, March 30 — The new chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress on Tuesday that a lack of cooperation from ousted Iraqi officials was thwarting American efforts to untangle the many remaining mysteries surrounding Iraq's suspected illicit weapons program. In the public version of testimony delivered behind closed doors to two Senate committees on Tuesday, the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, acknowledged that American inspectors had still not found any evidence of an illicit arsenal. But he seemed less inclined...

SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said Wednesday that he doesn't know whether intelligence about Iraqi weapons was misused by the Bush White House to justify going to war with Saddam Hussein. He said any American president in office during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks would have been deeply concerned about Saddam, and that it's possible that President Bush may have simply been selective about the facts he used to make the most persuasive appeal to the nation. "Politicians don't go around picking their weakest arguments," Kay said at Trinity University. "The real charge that deserves...

<p>When David Kay recovers from his weapons hunt, there's another Iraq-related quest I'd like to send him on. It's time a top intelligence team went scavenging for the real numbers on the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Program--that gigantic setup through which the U.N. from 1996 through 2003 supervised more than $100 billion worth of Saddam Hussein's selling of oil and buying of goods.</p>