Hi Sam, No problem....anything I can do to enlighten.

Hey Storman could you "enlighten" us as to what that report has to say with regard to say chemical weapons that Saddam may have been working on, or perhaps his aggressively and covertly working to develop a nuclear weapon and how long his Nuclear Weapons Committee said it would take to actually get one? Because if I'm not mistaken it was only about 1-1/2 to 2 years, which means he'd already have one if we hadn't gone to war.

OK, Kix, let me look around. I do know that your statement regarding Iraq's nuclear capability is wrong. They had zero nuclear capability in 2003....mainly because they hadn't had a nuclear program since 1991 and much of what they did have was destroyed during Desert Storm. Your 1 & 1/2 to 2 years statement pertains to Iraq's pre-Desert Storm capabilities and there is still much debate to its accuracy.

Iraq (before 1991) was trying to develop an indigenous nuclear weapons capability. Well, without nuclear reactors, one needs highly enriched uranium...and that's hard. You need centrifuge technology and that is very difficult. The Iraqis were working on it in the 80s, but it's debatable how close they actually were.

Here you go, Kix. This is from the unclassified version of a CIA report from 2004:

https://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq...004/index.html

Key Findings
Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date.

• Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

• Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

Nevertheless, after 1991, Saddam did express his intent to retain the intellectual capital developed during the Iraqi Nuclear Program. Senior Iraqis—several of them from the Regime’s inner circle—told ISG they assumed Saddam would restart a nuclear program once UN sanctions ended.

• Saddam indicated that he would develop the weapons necessary to counter any Iranian threat.


Initially, Saddam chose to conceal his nuclear program in its entirety, as he did with Iraq’s BW program. Aggressive UN inspections after Desert Storm forced Saddam to admit the existence of the program and destroy or surrender components of the program.

In the wake of Desert Storm, Iraq took steps to conceal key elements of its program and to preserve what it could of the professional capabilities of its nuclear scientific community.

• Baghdad undertook a variety of measures to conceal key elements of its nuclear program from successive UN inspectors, including specific direction by Saddam Husayn to hide and preserve documentation associated with Iraq’s nuclear program.

• ISG, for example, uncovered two specific instances in which scientists involved in uranium enrichment kept documents and technology. Although apparently acting on their own, they did so with the belief and anticipation of resuming uranium enrichment efforts in the future.

• Starting around 1992, in a bid to retain the intellectual core of the former weapons program, Baghdad transferred many nuclear scientists to related jobs in the Military Industrial Commission (MIC). The work undertaken by these scientists at the MIC helped them maintain their weapons knowledge base.

As with other WMD areas, Saddam’s ambitions in the nuclear area were secondary to his prime objective of ending UN sanctions.

• Iraq, especially after the defection of Husayn Kamil in 1995, sought to persuade the IAEA that Iraq had met the UN’s disarmament requirements so sanctions would be lifted.

ISG found a limited number of post-1995 activities that would have aided the reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program once sanctions were lifted.

• The activities of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission sustained some talent and limited research with potential relevance to a reconstituted nuclear program.

• Specific projects, with significant development, such as the efforts to build a rail gun and a copper vapor laser could have been useful in a future effort to restart a nuclear weapons program, but ISG found no indications of such purpose. As funding for the MIC and the IAEC increased after the introduction of the Oil-for-Food program, there was some growth in programs that involved former nuclear weapons scientists and engineers.

• The Regime prevented scientists from the former nuclear weapons program from leaving either their jobs or Iraq. Moreover, in the late 1990s, personnel from both MIC and the IAEC received significant pay raises in a bid to retain them, and the Regime undertook new investments in university research in a bid to ensure that Iraq retained technical knowledge.

Conclusion:
ISG judges that Iraq has not worked on nuclear weapons design since 1991. ISG investigated Iraq’s nuclear weapon design and component manufacture capabilities through interviews with scientists and other government employees, site visits of historically-associated Iraq nuclear weapon facilities, and exploitation of captured documents.

so yur mr. kno everthing and have secret papers. yyyeeeaaa right

Do yourself a favour, shut up for awhile.

I believe the WMD's were more than just nukes. Nerve agents and scuds are WMD's too. Of wich Saddam had to rid himself of after the war as part of the UN agreement. Falilure to do so is an act of war.

Hmmm.. Storman... that's odd because the following is from the 2006 Senate Intel Committee Report that you posted a link to earlier in this thread.

I wonder why they decided to leave all the info they got from this "high-level Iraqi official" out of the 2004 report but include it in this 2006 report. And I also wonder why the CIA "revised their conclusions significantly" after the war.

Do you know if anyone has blown the whistle yet with regard to being “pressured” into altering pre-war intelligence?

Do you ever wonder if it’s possible that they weren’t pressured before, but they’re being pressured now?

Kix, I tried to find your quote from one of the SSCI reports, but no luck....those are typewritten documents scanned into PDF....so, you can't do a word search. But, I think I can respond without it. The main purpose of the Senate 2006 reports was to directly compare pre and post-war intelligence. And, if you read those reports, you can tell (as I said earlier) that much of the pre-war intelligence (as in September 2002) was based on HUMINT...guys like Chalabi, etc.

One of the SSCI's conclusions (Conclusion #2, Pg 113) was that "the Iraqi National Congress attempted to influence US policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors to convince the US that Iraq was pursuing WMDs and had links to terrorists." The 2004 CIA report was the Senates main source for post-war intelligence upon which they based their conclusions. And they had the same conclusions as the CIA.

The 2004 CIA report was not a comparison. In fact, it was based mostly on information on the ground in Iraq after the war....very hands on. The pre-war HUMINT reporting was of little consequence. That's like having someone tell you what's under the hood, but then getting the chance to actually look under the hood and seeing for yourself.

Well, Kix, as I said before, it's very different looking from the inside out rather than the outside in. Most people feel that our pre-war HUMINT was very bad. But, once they (the CIA and others) were on the ground...inside Iraq....they had a much better idea.....hence, the significant revisions....not to mention they didn't have the Administration and the Pentagon with its Office of Special Plans breathing down their neck.

There has been some noise about Doug Feith and the Office of Special Plans, but I don't know where that stands.

No, not really. Pressure was evident before the war. But who would be doing the pressuring now? The CIA is NOT a liberal organization...not by a long shot. They work for the President. I would think that if there's any pressure, it would be to prove the Administration's pre-war statements.

Toby,

Nerve agents, yes, but conventional SCUDs are NOT considered WMDs.