Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction - 2003 Iraq War - Iraq Survey Group

Iraq Survey Group

On May 30, 2003, The U.S. Department of Defense briefed the media that it was ready to formally begin the work of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a fact finding mission from the coalition of the Iraq occupation into the WMD programs developed by Iraq, taking over from the British-American 75th Exploitation Task Force.

On October 6, 2004, the head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), Charles Duelfer, announced to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that the group found no evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had produced and stockpiled any weapons of mass destruction since 1991, when UN sanctions were imposed.

Various nuclear facilities, including the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility and Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, were found looted in the month following the invasion. (Gellman, May 3, 2003) On June 20, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that tons of uranium, as well as other radioactive materials such as thorium, had been recovered, and that the vast majority had remained on site. There were several reports of radiation sickness in the area. It has been suggested that the documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned in Iraq by looters in the final days of the war.

On May 2, 2004, a shell containing mustard gas was found in the middle of a street west of Baghdad. The Iraq Survey Group investigation reported that it had been previously "stored improperly", and thus the gas was "ineffective" as a useful chemical agent. Officials from the Defense Department commented that they were not certain if use was to be made of the device as a bomb.

On May 16, 2004, a 152 mm artillery shell was used as an improvised bomb. The shell exploded and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to a nerve agent (nausea and dilated pupils). On May 18 it was reported by U.S. Department of Defense intelligence officials that tests showed the two-chambered shell contained the chemical agent sarin, the shell being "likely" to have contained three to four liters of the substance (in the form of its two unmixed precursor chemicals prior to the aforementioned explosion that had not effectively mixed them). Former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told the Associated Press that "he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a hidden stockpile, although he didn't rule out that possibility." Kay also considered it possible that the shell was "an old relic overlooked when Saddam said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s." It is likely that the insurgents who planted the bomb did not know it contained sarin, according to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, and another U.S. official confirmed that the shell did not have the markings of a chemical agent. The Iraq Survey Group later concluded that the shell "probably originated with a batch that was stored in a Al Muthanna CW complex basement during the late 1980s for the purpose of leakage testing."

In a July 2, 2004, article published by The Associated Press and Fox News, it was reported that sarin gas warheads dating back to the last Iran–Iraq War were found in South Central Iraq by Polish Allies. The Polish troops secured munitions on June 23, 2004, but it turned out that the warheads did not in fact contain sarin gas but "were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals"—and it transpired that the Poles had bought the shells for $5,000 each. The United States abandoned its search for WMDs in Iraq on January 12, 2005.

On September 30, 2004, the U.S. Iraq Survey Group Final Report concluded that "ISG has not found evidence that Saddam Husayn (sic) possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but the available evidence from its investigation—including detainee interviews and document exploitation—leaves open the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq although not of a militarily significant capability." Among the key findings of the final ISG report were:

1. "Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq’s principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary."
2. "Saddam did not consider the United States a natural adversary, as he did Iran and Israel, and he hoped that Iraq might again enjoy improved relations with the United States, according to Tariq ‘Aziz and the presidential secretary."
3. Evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq's ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date;
4. Concealment of nuclear program in its entirety, as with Iraq's BW program. Aggressive UN inspections after Desert Storm forced Saddam to admit the existence of the program and destroy or surrender components of the program;
5. After Desert Storm, Iraq concealed key elements of its program and preserved what it could of the professional capabilities of its nuclear scientific community;
6. Saddam's ambitions in the nuclear area were secondary to his prime objective of ending UN sanctions; and
7. A limited number of post-1995 activities would have aided the reconstitution of the nuclear weapons program once sanctions were lifted.

The report found that "The ISG has not found evidence that Saddam possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, although not of a militarily significant capability." It also concluded that there was a possible intent to restart all banned weapons programs as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped, with Hussein pursuing WMD proliferation in the future: "There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted..." No senior Iraqi official interviewed by the ISG believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever.

After he was captured by U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who ran Saddam's nuclear centrifuge program until 1997, handed over blueprints for a nuclear centrifuge along with some actual centrifuge components, stored at his home – buried in the front yard – awaiting orders from Baghdad to proceed. He said, "I had to maintain the program to the bitter end." In his book, "The Bomb in My Garden", the Iraqi physicist explains that his nuclear stash was the key that could have unlocked and restarted Saddam's bombmaking program. However, it would require a massive investment and a re-creation of thousands of centrifuges in order to reconstitute a full centrifugal enrichment program.

On October 3, 2003, the world digests David Kay's Iraq Survey Group report that finds no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, although it states the government intended to develop more weapons with additional capabilities. Weapons inspectors in Iraq do find some "biological laboratories" and a collection of "reference strains", including a strain of botulinum bacteria, "ought to have been declared to the UN." Kay testifies that Iraq had not fully complied with UN inspections. In some cases, equipment and materials subject to UN monitoring had been kept hidden from UN inspectors. "So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas", Kay would say in a later interview. In other cases, Iraq had simply lied to the UN in its weapons programs. The U.S.-sponsored search for WMD had at this point cost $300 million and was projected to cost around $600 million more.

In David Kay's statement on the interim report of the ISG the following paragraphs are found:

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis."

"With regard to delivery systems, the ISG team has discovered sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if OIF had not occurred, dramatically breached UN restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War."

"ISG has gathered testimony from missile designers at Al Kindi State Company that Iraq has reinitiated work on converting SA-2 Surface-to-Air Missiles into ballistic missiles with a range goal of about 250 km. Engineering work was reportedly underway in early 2003, despite the presence of UNMOVIC. This program was not declared to the UN."

"ISG has developed multiple sources of testimony, which is corroborated in part by a captured document, that Iraq undertook a program aimed at increasing the HY-2's range and permitting its use as a land-attack missile. These efforts extended the HY-2's range from its original 100 km to 150–180 km. Ten modified missiles were delivered to the military prior to OIF and two of these were fired from Umm Qasr during OIF – one was shot down and one hit Kuwait."

Another notable statement is the following:

"We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

The phrase 'WMD-related program activities' was later used in George Bush's state of the union speech. Bush's critics derided Bush for unclear wording and trying to "lower the bar" on confirming his pre-war WMD-claims.

In a January 26, 2004 interview with Tom Brokaw of NBC news, Mr. Kay described Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs as being in a "rudimentary" stage. He also stated that "What we did find, and as others are investigating it, we found a lot of terrorist groups and individuals that passed through Iraq." In responding to a question by Mr. Brokaw as to whether Iraq was a "gathering threat" as President Bush had asserted before the invasion, Mr. Kay answered:

Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It’s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.

In June 2004, the United States removed 2 tons of low-enriched uranium from Iraq, sufficient raw material for a single nuclear weapon.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, several reported finds of chemical weapons were announced. During the invasion itself, there were half a dozen incidents in which the U.S. military announced that it had found chemical weapons. All of these claims were based on field reports, and were later retracted. After the war, many cases – most notably on April 7, 2003 when several large drums tested positive – continued to be reported in the same way.

Another such post-war case occurred on January 9, 2004, when Icelandic munitions experts and Danish military engineers discovered 36 120-mm mortar rounds containing liquid buried in Southern Iraq. While initial tests suggested that the rounds contained a blister agent, a chemical weapon banned by the Geneva Convention, subsequent analysis by American and Danish experts showed that no chemical agent was present. It appears that the rounds have been buried, and most probably forgotten, since the Iran–Iraq War. Some of the munitions were in an advanced state of decay and most of the weaponry would likely have been unusable.

Demetrius Perricos, then head of UNMOVIC, stated that the Kay report contained little information not already known by UNMOVIC. Many organizations, such as the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, have claimed that Kay's report is a "worst case analysis"

Beginning in 2003, the ISG had uncovered remnants of Iraq's 1980s-era WMD programs. On June 21, 2006 Rick Santorum claimed that "we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons", citing a declassified June 6 letter to Pete Hoekstra saying that since the 2003 invasion, a total of "approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent" had been found scattered throughout the country.

The Washington Post reported that "the U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active." It said the shells "had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988."

On July 2008, 550 metric tonnes of "yellowcake" the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium, arrived in Montreal as part of a top-secret U.S. operation. This transport of the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment, included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a voyage across two oceans. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth "tens of millions of dollars."