4.4 | The search for WMD

because Iraq never successfully formulated its biological agents for long-term

storage.”

• ‘Residual Proliferation Risk: Equipment and Materials’. The ISG judged

that Iraq’s remaining chemical and biological infrastructure did not pose a

proliferation concern. Some potential nuclear-related dual-use equipment was

missing, but the ISG had not established its “ultimate disposition”.

• ‘Iraq’s Military Industrial Capability – Evolution of the Military Industrialization

Commission’. Additional information on the MIC based principally on custodial

interviews with former senior members.

890. The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding

Weapons of Mass Destruction, established by President Bush on 6 February 2004,

published its Report on 31 March 2005.499

891. In their covering letter to President Bush, the members of the Commission wrote:

“We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its

pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major

intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community’s inability

to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing

what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its

analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence …

“After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence

Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein’s programs was

what they believed. They were simply wrong.”

892. In September 2006, the JIC issued an Assessment considering recent US recovery

of chemical munitions, ‘Iraqi Chemical Weapons: Implications of Recent Finds’.500

It addressed:

• a series of US-led operations to purchase chemical weapons in MND(SE);

• recent US discoveries of canisters from a previously unidentified site at Taji,

a large military complex north of Baghdad; and

• occasional individual finds.

499 The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass

Destruction, 31 March 2005, Report to the President of the United States.

500 JIC Assessment, 28 September 2006, ‘Iraqi Chemical Weapons: Implications of Recent Finds’.

603