How hard are they really trying to find WMD?

That may sound like a silly question, but as I noted a few days ago, there seems to be something rather strange going on in the search for Iraq's WMD.

Prior to the war, we were slow to give information to the UN inspectors on where we believed weapons might be, and when we did finally give it to them, none of the information we provided led them to find anything. [That right there should have told the Bush administration that there was either a problem with their apparent policy of only paying attention to intelligence that supported their pre-conceived notion that there were WMD to be found OR that there was something wrong with the intelligence being gathered by the CIA and friends.]

After stalling for months, the United States finally shared some of its intelligence with UNMOVIC. But, according to UNMOVIC officials, none of the intelligence it received yielded any incriminating discoveries.

Since the war has ended, things haven't been much better. We failed to secure many of the sites where we suspected WMD might have been hidden, and we allowed seven nuclear facilities to be looted by not securing them in any way. The administration has said that the military teams sent in to find Iraq's WMD have run out of places to look (this, in spite of arguments from the administration that our failure to find WMD so far doesn't mean there aren't any - and that because Iraq is such a big country, it may take a long time to find where the WMD are hidden), and that Pentagon intelligence experts will be coming in.

This last bit is interesting in light of two recent revelations. The first is what had prompted me to write the other day - it turns out that there is a plant in Baghdad that created and produced all of the missiles, rockets and warheads Saddam had or was interested in. While the site has been looted, the director-general of the plant says that there are still documents on all of these systems available for us to look at. These documents would detail any kind of weapon delivery system or warhead Saddam had, and is information the United Nations inspectors very much wanted to see. Yet when a reporter asked one of our missile experts about the site and the documents, he'd never heard of it, and there are apparently no plans at all to visit the site or check out the documents.

The other revelation is that Tony Blair - who is facing serious questions about the fact that no WMD have been found yet and the nature of the intelligence that the pre-war claims were based on - has been trying desparately to get the US to offer some of the higher-level Iraqi officials we've taken into custody some kind of leniency so that they will be more willing to reveal what information they might have about Saddam's weapons program - and so far, we're refusing to make any kind of a plea-bargain with any of them.

I honestly don't know what the deal is, but the more I think about all of this, the more apparent it is that the Bush administration either does not want to find whatever WMD Saddam may have had, or, at the very least, doesn't want it to be proven that Saddam didn't have any.

Think about that.

• We didn't want to help the UN inspectors before the war, when we did try to help them, the info we gave them was useless to them
• We tried to rush the UN inspectors through their job and then pulled them out before they'd had a chance to finish their work
• We left possible WMD and nuclear sites unsecured and open to looting
• We had teams search 230 sites and have now decided there's no where else for them to look, and so are reassigning them
• We've chosen to ignore a plant-full of information on Saddams missile and warheads systems, and
• We're refusing to make any deals with Saddam's former officials in exchange for the kind of information they administration says we'll need to find the WMD.

Have you ever seen a search more well set-up to fail? I don't think I have.

So, what's the deal here? Anyone have any ideas?

Posted by thorswitch at June 20, 2003 03:27 PM | TrackBack