Excerpts from previous updates, by subject:

Removed on October 8, 2004

The intelligence debate

In testimony before the Senate in September, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that, although before the war he believed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, he now believes that no such stockpiles will be found. His testimony is remarkable, given that when asked in February 2004 about lapses in intelligence information, Secretary Powell told the Washington Post that he did not know whether he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he had known the country did not have illicit weapons. He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get." And British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined the fray on September 28 at the Labor Party conference by acknowledging officially that “the evidence about Saddam having actual … weapons … turned out to be wrong.”

Another allegation lodged by the U.S. government before the war – that Iraq was developing pilotless drones to deliver mass destruction agents – has not withstood the test of time either. A report released at the end of August by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) concluded that Iraqi unmanned aircraft were intended for conventional military uses rather than for the disbursement of chemical or biological weapons.

The weapon search

On March 30, the Special Advisor to the ISG, Charles Duelfer, delivered an interim report on his investigation of Iraq's weapon capabilities to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Duelfer said he was looking into the intentions of Saddam Hussein's regime: "what Saddam ordered, what his ministers ordered, and how the plans fit together." Duelfer said Saddam's regime had plans to sanitize sensitive sites on as little as 15 minutes notice. He also said the ISG had uncovered new information about dual-use facilities that could have produced biological and chemical agents quickly, giving Iraq a "breakout" capability.

Duelfer said he did not know how long the weapons hunt would take. He described the reluctance of Iraqi weapon experts to speak freely as a central impediment to the investigation, and said that the usefulness of collected documents was limited by the linguistic capabilities of his staff to translate them.

Duelfer's predecessor David Kay, who resigned in January 2004, has since indicated that he believes no stockpiles of weapons will be found.