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No Sign of Iraqi Efforts to Provide Terrorists With Banned Weapons, Expert Says
A military and intelligence expert has said that the Iraq Survey Group, which is currently searching for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, has found no evidence so far to suggest that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime ever tried to provide terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 14). The finding was made in a report released Friday by Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman based his report on briefings over the past two weeks with chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay and other U.S. civilian and military officials in Iraq. “No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists,” Cordesman wrote of a briefing with Kay. “Only possibility was Saddam’s Fedayeen (his son’s irregular terrorist force) and talk only,” the report says. The threat that Hussein might have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists was cited by the Bush administration in its effort to justify war, according to the Washington Post. Last week, Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith defended that stance during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations (see GSN, Nov. 14). “The idea that we didn’t have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group,” Feith said, “doesn’t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn’t expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Nov. 16). Meanwhile, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has said that there is also no evidence that Hussein transferred any WMD stockpiles to Syria, according to Reuters. “I’ve seen reports, as everyone has,” Rice said in an interview Friday with WTVT-TV in Tampa, Fla. “We don’t have any evidence at this point that that’s what happened,” she said (Reuters/New York Times, Nov. 14).
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