Experts Believed No Iraqi WMDs in 2001

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By Roger Ward
Canadian Press
July 18, 2003

A conference of top-level military analysts was told Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- a message that later fell on deaf ears in the American capital, analysts say.

Former Canadian military officer-turned-analyst, Sunil Ram remembers the January 2001 conference Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq: A Ten-Year Review.

What he heard at the meeting he has repeated for months, he says, getting little attention from the mainstream media: that U.S. President George W. Bush had no grounds to base the invasion of Iraq on the disarmament issue.

"The people doing the presentation were weapons inspectors and former weapons inspectors and senior members of (U.S. government) agencies," Ram said in an interview.

"These were the guys on the ground (in Iraq) who had this stuff (weapons facilities) taken apart."

The conclusion they reached, says Ram, was that "Iraq's nuclear weapons program (didn't exist) because (the Iraqi government) had dismantled it."

He says the message of experts at the meeting was heard loud and clear by many U.S. military and political officials.

He admits the message didn't necessarily mean Saddam Hussein was not trying to acquire nuclear capability, but points out that months before the United States was insisting Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to other nations, top U.S. officials had been told the opposite.

More http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/justify/2003/0718experts.htm