2.2.04
Report: US officials knew in May of lack of Iraqi WMD
This is news, but hardly surprising at this point:
This is news, but hardly surprising at this point:
Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.It is clear that certain people knew much more about Iraq's WMD than they are letting on. The fact that the US army did nothing to secure suspected WMD sites in Iraq and allowed them to be stripped bare by looters says something - but exactly what is the question. This issue is just one reason why we need an independent commission with far-reaching powers to investigate all aspects of the Iraq war.
Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
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Among those interviewed by The Observer was a very senior US intelligence official serving during the war against Iraq with an intimate knowledge of the search for Iraq's WMD.
'We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, "where did we go wrong?",' he said last week. 'We had already made the judgment that something very wrong had happened [in May] and our confidence was shaken to its foundations.'
The source, a career intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was also scathing about the massive scale of the failure of intelligence over Iraq both in the US and among its foreign allies - alleging that the intelligence community had effectively suppressed dissenting views and intelligence.
