NO WMD's, Paperwork Errors -- In Foreign Press - Has been Mostly Ignored In America

Saddam didn't lie; there are no WMDs, UN inspectors say

The UN's senior weapons inspectors now say they believe Saddam Hussein was telling the truth when he claimed he had no weapons of mass destruction.

In addition, the Iraqi nuclear program was in such a shambles it was unlikely to be able to produce atomic weapons any time soon.

If it isn't in the New York Times or The Washington Post, Meet the Press can't use it against Cheney. Tim doesn't watch CNN which had the interview with Hans Blix.


Oops, a week ago CBS had a very similar story. I had also noticed a mention in the LA Times that didn't seem to get publicity. Same facts - there were no weapons, a different angle.

U.N. inspectors found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build weapons, the atomic agency chief said in a confidential report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

Former weapons inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that what the U.S. alleged were "unaccountable" stockpiles may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

It was always a "fragile assumption" to expect Iraq to provide a highly detailed, fully consistent and well-documented account of all its weapons work, said U.S. defense analyst Carl Conetta. No military can do that, he wrote in a report recapping the Iraq inspections.

A U.S. audit last year, for example, found the Pentagon had lost track of more than 1 million chemical-biological protective suits, said Conetta, of the Project on Defense Alternatives, a private think tank.

In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in 1994 that almost three tons of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs, had "vanished" from U.S. stocks, because of discrepancies between "book inventory" and "physical inventory."

EL - The foreign and underground press has been saying that for a year. Are the American people finally going to hear it? Who is going to drumbeat it into them, which is the secret the GOP has learned? To break through the clutter of information you have to beat the story everyday.