U.N.: Most Iraqi WMD Long Gone

Iraq apparently destroyed most of its known chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles years before the United States invaded last March, a report from United Nations inspectors claims.

The quarterly report by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, includes a timeline that shows most of the destruction took place before 1995.

And it says that during inspections in late 2002 and early 2003, "No evidence of either current or recent development or production of proscribed munitions was uncovered."

However, inspectors did see some weapons of mass destruction munitions that it knew about, or that the Iraqis showed them. And there were also small batches of items that may have been related to weapons of mass destruction; those are under review. That means that "residual munitions from the former Iraqi chemical and biological weapons program may be found in the future."

The U.S. Iraqi Survey Group has been searching for weapons since the fall of Saddam Hussein last April. But it is not sharing data with its United Nations predecessors, the report said, nor asked for any information from UNMOVIC.

"Note has been made however of the testimony of David Kay," the U.N. report said. Kay told a Senate hearing in January that, "the efforts that had been directed to this point have been sufficiently intense that it is unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons" in Iraq.

Kay's findings and the U.N. report echo what former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said — that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were destroyed largely before 1994.

"It's just confirmation," Blix told The Associated Press in Stockholm by mobile phone from Kiev, Ukraine. "It's no secret that no weapons have been destroyed since 1994."

UNMOVIC spokesman Ewen Buchanan said Blix's final report showed that the things that were destroyed after 1994 "were basically production equipment and facilities."

"The small finds of weapons in the second half of the 1990s were deemed to be just remnants of old programs, and not indications of hidden stockpiles," Buchanan said.

"The UNMOVIC report on arms inspections in Iraq released today points a finger at Washington for not cooperating in the past," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "and asks the Bush Administration to correct this problem by providing an update on the U.S. Iraq Survey Group the next time around."

Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction stockpiles were a major justification for the U.S-led invasion.

Kay has reported that Iraq had an illegal weapons program, and had illegally concealed weapons-related programs in other areas. But no actual weapons have been found.

During the run up to war, both Bix and International Atomic Energy Agency executive director Mohammed ElBaradei cast doubt on Bush administration claims that Iraq possessed weapons or had active programs to produce them. The Bush administration said the U.N. inspectors were being duped by Iraqi intelligence.

Now, the Bush administration's case for war is under investigation by a special presidential commission, the House and Senate intelligence committees and internal and external CIA probes.

A separate FBI probe is examining forged evidence on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger. The Justice Department is investigating who leaked the name of a CIA officer married to a former U.S. diplomat who criticized the White House case for war.

In the months since major fighting ended, several theories have emerged to explain why intelligence on Iraq was so far off target. It's possible Saddam was bluffing to try to prevent an attack, or that his own scientists lied to him. Iraqi defectors may have had a motive to embellish what they told U.S. intelligence.

Others note that when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the flow of information was curtailed. That meant there was little to offset the working assumption that Saddam would seek new weapons.

Some Democrats charge that the Bush administration exaggerated the evidence against Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee has expanded its review of to examine whether the administration accurately described the information it had.

There were differences between how classified CIA reports and public presentations described Iraq's capabilities.

Last month, CIA director George Tenet said his agency's analysts "never said there was an imminent threat." The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, drafted in October 2002, reveal doubts by some intelligence agencies about the extent of its nuclear program, the purpose of work its on unmanned aircraft, its doctrine for using WMD and the circumstances under which Saddam might partner with al Qaeda.

Administration officials rarely, if ever, hinted at those doubts.

And when Mr. Bush and aides in January 2003 mentioned an allegation that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, it flew in the face of repeated efforts by the agency to keep the charge — which was not substantiated — out of the case for war.

The report said UNMOVIC is examining Iraq as a case study of how a country came to possess offensive weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities: how its chemical weapons research began as an effort to defend Iraqi troops against such weapons, how civilian industry became intertwined with military WMD production, how conventional arms were modified to deliver WMD, and how Iraq hid its intentions even from countries that sold it equipment used to make WMD.

UNMOVIC is also working on a plan for monitoring Iraq in the future, when the post-Gulf War ban on weapons of mass destruction programs will still be in place.

During last year's inspections, inspectors destroyed several Al Samoud missiles because they violated range restrictions and got rid of a handful of chemical weapons shells and biological growth media, which Iraq had previously declared.

UNMOVIC inspectors left Iraq shortly before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The report notes that because inspectors were forced out, "the disposition of 25 additional missiles, 38 warheads, six launchers, six command vehicles and 326 missile engines designated by UNMOVIC for destruction remains unknown to UNMOVIC."