Wolf -- WMDs: Did Iraq ever have them?

Looks like Wolf is slowly becoming convinced there is something to this story.

In the weeks and months leading up to the war with Iraq, President Bush and his top advisers were categorical in warning of a threat.

"The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hasn't accounted for that material. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed it," outlined the president in his State of the Union address.

Top U.N. weapons inspectors, in contrast, were much more nuanced in their bottom line assessments.

In January, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix told reporters at the United Nations, "In the course of these inspections, we have not found any smoking gun."

"No prohibited nuclear activities have been identified during these inspections," International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council on January 29.

On the eve of the war, Saddam Hussein and his loyalists insisted they had no weapons of mass destruction -- period.

Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammed Aldouri insisted in January, "The bottom line ... is: One, you can accuse as much as you like, but you cannot provide one piece of evidence."

Now, nearly four months after the start of the war, even some previous supporters are openly expressing their doubts.

There is a transcript here.

BRZEZINSKI: And the larger problem is that the United States stated, at the highest level, repeatedly, without any qualification whatsoever, that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction. Not just nuclear, but bacteriological and chemical. And that was stated without any ambiguity. In fact it was hyped. It was stated that Iraq is armed with the most dangerous weapons that man has ever devised.

And that's why we went to war. This is what we said to the world. This is what we said to the American people.

BLITZER: Well, do you have any doubt about that?

BRZEZINSKI: Well, it's clear that they weren't armed with these weapons. They didn't use them. We defeated their army in the field. We have control over their arsenals. We haven't found them.

We're now maintaining that they may be hidden somewhere, which is kind of comical, actually. If they had them, and the were armed to the teeth with them, why didn't they use them? If they didn't use them and hid them, that means they were deterred. And how do you hide all of these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of weapons with which they're armed?

The problem is, was that administration misled by very poor intelligence? In which case, some heads should roll in the intelligence community, absolutely, because an intelligence failure at this scale totally destroys American global credibility. Or...

BLITZER: All right. Dr. Kissinger? BRZEZINSKI: ... or was anyone in the administration hyping it while as the intelligence was qualifying it? And that has to be established.

BLITZER: Well, the intelligence analysts and professionals were more nuanced, whereas the top leadership, you're suggesting, may have been black and white?

BRZEZINSKI: But that's the issue that has to be established because I think the credibility of our system, domestically and internationally, depends on that issue being resolved.