An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to find a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulated in Washington and London.
A draft of the report, compiled by the CIA-led, 1 400-strong Iraq Survey Group, has been sent to the White House, the Pentagon and Downing Street, a United States intelligence source said, and will contain no evidence of Iraqi stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
”It demonstrates that the main judgements of the National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false,” said the source.
The timing of this disclosure could hardly be worse for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, just days before the start of the Labour party conference. Iraq has dogged the prime minister almost continuously for five months, overshadowing the domestic agenda. Downing Street had been hoping for respite after the end of the Hutton inquiry, which closes today.
Blair put forward Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as the reason for going to war and he has repeatedly insisted that the weapons would be found.
He told a sceptical Conservative MP in the Commons on April 30 that he was absolutely convinced that Iraq had such weapons and predicted that, when the report was published, ”you and others will be eating some of your words”.
Although Downing Street on Wednesday night officially dismissed the leak as speculation, government sources confirmed that it was accurate.
A No 10 spokesperson said: ”People should wait. The reports today are speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report that has not even been presented yet. And when it comes it will be an interim report. The Iraq Survey Group’s work will go on.”
He added: ”Our clear expectation is that this interim report will not reach firm conclusions about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.”
The government defence will be to stress that failure to find weapons of mass destruction does not mean that they do not exist.
Wednesday night’s leak will fuel the anti-war sentiment ahead of Saturday’s demonstration in London for withdrawal of US and British troops from Iraq. It will also make it harder for Labour party organisers to resist grassroots pressure for a debate on Iraq.
The interim report is at present pencilled in for publication next week but the Labour party, anxious to avoid it landing in the middle of its conference, is trying to get that changed.
The results of the Iraq Survey Group’s search are also disappointing for the White House.
There is a debate within the administration over whether the report would be delivered to Congress at all, but congressional aides said they expected to hear from the head of the Iraq Survey Group, former United Nations inspector David Kay, as early as next week.
He arrived back from Iraq last Wednesday and since then has been working on the report.
It is now thought that the Iraq Survey Group investigation will dwell on Saddam Hussein’s capability and intentions.
The National Intelligence Estimate was put together by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, and claimed that the Iraqi leader had chemical and biological stockpiles, and a continuing nuclear programme that could produce a home-made bomb before the end of the decade.
The National Intelligence Estimate became a key document in the propaganda war waged by US President George Bush in the runup to the invasion of Iraq in March, although intelligence officials warned that many of the nuances and cautionary notes from original reports had been removed from the final documents.
According to accounts of the Iraq Survey Group draft, captured Iraqi scientists gave the investigation an account of how weapons were destroyed, but those accounts refer back to the period immediately after the 1991 Gulf war.
The nuclear section of the survey group has also finished its work and left Iraq.
After addressing the Senate in July, a bullish Kay claimed ”solid evidence” was being gathered and warned journalists to expect ”surprises”.
No such surprises appear to be in the draft.
The CIA took the unusual step of playing down expectations of the report on Wednesday.
”Dr Kay is still receiving information from the field. It will be just the first progress report, and we expect that it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out,” the chief agency spokesperson, Bill Harlow, said.
An intelligence official added on Wednesday that the timing of the report’s release ”had yet to be determined”.
In London, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is David Kay’s report. We do not have it. We will comment on it when it is presented.
”When it comes, it will be an interim report. The Iraq Survey Group’s work will continue. The reports are speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report that has not yet even been presented yet.”
David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, said: ”It’s clear that the US and British governments wildly exaggerated the case for going to war.”
But he added that the fact that the survey group had not found concrete evidence of weapons did not mean that the Baghdad regime did not have programmes to quickly reconstitute programmes and weapons at short notice.
”Just because they can’t find it, doesn’t mean it’s not there,” Albright said.
”I’m not surprised, given how incompetent this search had been. They’ve had bad relations with the [Iraqi] scientists from the start because they treated them all as criminals.”
Many of the Iraqi scientists and officials who surrendered to US forces have been held in detention for months without contact with their families, despite assurances they would be well treated if they cooperated.
But recently the Bush administration, under mounting pressure to justify the invasion, has been trying to improve the incentives for former Saddam loyalists to provide information.
Reuters quoted a senior US official on Wednesday as saying that the former defence minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, had been given ”effective” immunity in the hope that he would provide information on Saddam’s weapons programmes.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, declined to comment on the Iraq Survey Group report.
”If people want evidence, they don’t have to wait for Dr Kay’s report. What they can do is look at the volumes of reports from the weapons inspectors going back over a dozen years including the final report from Unmovic on March 7 this year, which set out 29 separate areas of unanswered disarmament questions to Iraq,” he said. — Guardian Unlimited Â