Report: Iraq Was No Present Danger

Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States and there was no solid evidence that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the al Qaeda terror network, a private think tank maintained Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has pulled a 400-member weapons hunting team out of Iraq, according to The New York Times, in a possible sign of waning confidence that weapons of mass destruction will be found.

Citing the CIA and other U.S. intelligence offices, the White House claimed before attacking Iraq that Saddam had potent caches of weapons of mass destruction and plans to produce more of them.

No weapons have been reported found to date by the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group.

Its director, David Kay, reported to Congress in October that there was evidence Iraq had violated U.N. resolutions and hid proscribed activities, but cited no evidence of weapons or advanced programs to make them.

Evidence collected so far indicates Iraq had only preliminary plans to develop some banned weapons, particularly missiles, the Washington Post on Wednesday.

In its report released Thursday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace finds the Bush administration systematically misrepresented a weapons threat from Iraq.

"Iraq's WMD programs represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored. They did not, however, pose an immediate threat to the
United States, to the region, or to global security," wrote authors Jessica T. Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich.

The Carnegie report said Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence it was being revived.

And the U.S.-led war on Iraq in 1991 combined with U.N. sanctions and inspections "effectively destroyed" Iraq's ability to produce chemical weapons on a large scale, the report said.

The real threat was posed by what Iraq might have been able to do in the future, such as starting production of biological weapons quickly in the event of war, Carnegie said. But U.N. inspections and sanctions were working to contain the threat.

However, Iraq apparently was expanding its capability to build missiles beyond the range permitted by the U.N. Security Council, the report said. "The missile program appears to have been the one program in active development in 2002," it said.

The Carnegie authors also conclude "there was no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and al Qaeda," the report said.

And, Carnegie said, "there was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to al Qaeda and much evidence to counter it."

In the weeks before the war, the administration also intensified its allegations of links between Saddam and the al Qaeda terror network headed by Osama bin Laden and believed responsible for a series of attacks on the United States, including those against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Recent reports have indicated that some intelligence pointed to contacts between Saddam agents and al Qaeda, but no evidence has been reported to confirm that.

The report said the U.S. intelligence process failed on Iraq and that Bush administration officials dropped qualifications and expressions of uncertainty presented by U.S. intelligence analysts.

It says that shifts in CIA assessments on Iraq in 2002 "suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views."

"Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs, beyond the intelligence failures …" the report states.

The United States should consider making the job of CIA director a career post instead of a political appointment and set up a permanent system to guard against the spread of dangerous technology, the report suggests.

The report also recommends changing Bush administration's policy "to eliminate a U.S. doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war in the absence of imminent threat."

The Post says there are several theories on why the prewar intelligence has not been confirmed.

One is that Iraqi scientists created fake weapons programs to elicit more funding from Saddam's government. Another possibility is that scientists exaggerated Iraq's capabilities to Saddam to keep the dictator happy.

Officials tell The Times that the hunt for weapons goes on.

After the withdrawal of the 400-member team, separate unit that specializes in biological and chemical weapons remains in Iraq.

However, Kay indicated last month that he might soon reason for personal reasons, according to published reports.