Excerpts from previous political updates, by subject

June 30, 2003

The intelligence debate in Britain

The Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee has begun a closed door inquiry into charges that British prime minister Tony Blair's government exaggerated the threat from Iraq's weapons. The committee meets in secret and does not disclose the date or time of its meetings. The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons has undertaken a second -public- inquiry, and has heard testimony from former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, current Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prime Minister Blair's communications director Alastair Campbell. Prime Minister Blair welcomed these inquiries, but denied as "totally false" recent allegations that the British intelligence dossier released last September had been made "sexier" to gain support for going to war. In particular, the assertion that the Iraqi military was capable of deploying chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes has been questioned.

The weapon search

The fact that U.S.-led search teams have yet to uncover definitive proof that Iraq maintained mass destruction weaponry is fueling criticism of the weapons hunt. The Bush administration has attempted to quiet these concerns. In an interview on May 29, the president asserted that "we found the weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, referring to the two trailers believed to be mobile biological weapons production facilities. An intelligence assessment of these two trailers, released on May 28, called them the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological weapons program." And in a recent interview, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that Saddam Hussein's regime operated a "sophisticated deception program and it will take time to untangle that."

Nevertheless, to boost the search effort the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), a new team of inspectors led by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, was deployed to take over from mobile teams from the 75^th Exploitation Task Force. The new group is composed of about 1,400 military and scientific personnel from the United States, Britain and Australia. Of that number, about 300 experts actually conduct searches, with others interviewing Iraqis and analyzing documents related to weapon programs. This new team was fully deployed by August.


The departure of Gen. Jay Garner

On June 1, retired General Jay Garner, who heads the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), and who previously ran the U.S.-led transition team in Iraq, quietly left the country. He was replaced by career diplomat L. Paul Bremer III.