Quietly buried until after Christmas,
this was the first thing I read when I got to work this morning. It's maddening! Not only is BushCo getting away with the lies they used to provoke an illegal war, there will be no accountability for the money wasted on a search for non-existent weapons, AND many scientists or technicians who may actually have working knowledge of WMDs have evidently disappeared. Way to go, Bush!
The lie is obvious: NO ONE will go on record now stating that there were never any WMDs.
Search for WMD in Iraq ended
Effort folded shortly before Christmas
By Dafna Linzer
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.
~snip~
Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.
~snip~
The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work and will not be replaced in Baghdad.
~snip~
Intelligence officials said there is little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer's last report answered as many outstanding questions as possible. The ISG has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt.
~snip~
Congress allotted hundreds of millions of dollars for the weapons hunt, and there has been no public accounting of the funds. A spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said the entire budget and the expenditures would remain classified.
~snip~
It has been more than a year since any Iraqi scientist was arrested in connection with weapons of mass destruction. Many of those questioned and cleared have since left Iraq, one senior official said, acknowledging for the first time that "brain drain" that has long been feared "is well underway."