"Jim -" wrote in message news:SAXeb.482220
So you agree that there are WOMD to be found.

I don't. Did you perhaps happen to hear about the behind closed doors
meeting? Here is an article from the Washington Post:

Washington -- After searching for nearly six months, U.S. forces and
CIA experts have found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq and
have determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only "the very most
rudimentary" state, the Bush administration's chief investigator
formally told Congress Thursday.

Before the war, the administration said Iraq had a well-developed
nuclear program that presented a threat to the United States.

Now, "It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program,
based on what we discovered," former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay,
who heads the government's search, said Thursday after briefing House
and Senate intelligence committees in a closed session on his interim
report.

He said he would need six to nine months to conclude his work, and
congressional sources said the administration was requesting an
additional $600 million toward the effort to find weapons of mass
destruction. Kay's team has already spent $300 million.

Kay, who heads the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group, said the team
had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and
significant amounts of equipment" that Iraq had hidden. He said he
believed "there was an intent . . . to continue production at some
point in time."

Among the evidence unearthed was a network of laboratories and safe
houses, a laboratory complex hidden in a prison and evidence of a
program for ballistic and land-attack missiles with ranges prohibited
by the United Nations.

After Kay's briefing, lawmakers from both parties criticized the
intelligence community for misreading the facts on the ground, and
some said they believed the administration had misled the public about
the threat Iraq posed.

"I'm not pleased by what I heard today," said Sen. Pat Roberts,
R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who
has been supportive of the administration and the CIA. Roberts said he
believed some of the raw intelligence did not support the
administration's prewar statements about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction and called some of the claims "sloppy. "

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, emerged from Kay's briefing
charging that her "sorriest suspicions" had been confirmed.

The United States and much of the world "fell for one of the biggest
scams of mankind," Tauscher said, who added that she had left the
meeting with the impression that Iraq never posed an imminent threat.

"Clearly, our administration puffed-up, cherry-picked and amplified --
held on like a desperate dog to a bone in their teeth -- any piece of
information they could that substantiated their predisposition to
believing the worst," Tauscher said. "Now, we find out not only that
we may not have a smoking gun, we may not even have a gun."

Tauscher called for an international team of inspectors to take over
the weapons search in Iraq.

In a separate but related matter, CIA Director George Tenet this week
sent an angry letter to the two top House intelligence committee
members to dispute as misguided and ill-informed their criticism of
the raw intelligence used to assess the threat from Iraq.

"The suggestion by the committee that we did not challenge
long-standing judgments and assessments is simply wrong," Tenet, a
former Capitol Hill intelligence panel aide known for his smooth
dealings with members of Congress,

said in a letter to chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., of the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, and ranking member Jane Harman, D-El
Segundo.

He was responding to a letter the two had sent him last week, after
their panel examined 19 volumes of data underlying the assessment that
Iraq posed a threat to the United States. The letter called the
information outdated, circumstantial and fragmentary and criticized
the CIA for not adequately vetting information or challenging some of
its long-held assumptions.

Kay said his search was hindered by what appeared to be the
destruction and looting of laboratories and archival records areas,
including the destruction of selective computer hard drives as late as
May. Inspectors found "small piles of ash where individual documents
or binders of documents were intentionally destroyed," he said.

The team, Kay said, found evidence of new research on biological
weapons agents, one biological organism concealed in a scientist's
home that could be used to produce biological weapons, and labs with
the capability to "surge the production of (biological) agents"
quickly.

Kay described the two mobile labs discovered after the war ended in
northern Iraq -- which President Bush once said confirmed that Hussein
possessed programs for weapons of mass destruction -- as not being
"ideally suited" for that use. "We have not yet been able to
corroborate the existence of a mobile BW (biological weapons)
production effort," the report states.

Kay said investigators had developed anecdotal information that
Hussein once asked military officials how long it would take to
produce chemical agents and weapons, and that one of Hussein's sons
had asked in mid-2002 how he could get chemical materials for his
special troops, known as Fedayeen Saddam.

The survey has begun looking at equipment that could be used to resume
chemical production, Kay said. He also indicated that there were leads
on other purchases and attempted purchases of chemical agents. He said
many scientists said Iraq did not have "a large, ongoing, centrally
controlled (chemical) weapons program after 1991." That finding
conflicts with a finding in the intelligence community's October 2002
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that it was active.

Kay said Hussein wanted to obtain nuclear weapons, according to
interviews with Iraqi scientists and government officials, but "to
date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant
post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile
material."

On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said that "the evidence indicates that
Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. . . . Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Kay said his team's major discoveries were in the area of missile
development. It found plans for building missiles that could travel up
to 1, 000 kilometers, far more than the 150 kilometers allowed under
United Nations restrictions.