Remember Hans Blix? It seems the Senate Intelligence Committee panel investigating pre-war intelligence does not–or perhaps they just don’t want to. Fortunately, Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association does. Via News Unfiltered.
[T]he committee report makes an inexcusable and obvious error of omission that most of the mainstream media and commentariat continue to overlook: the Bush administration and Congress ignored the widely-available findings of the UN weapons inspectors weeks before the U.S. invasion.
On Feb. 13, 2003, the chief UN inspector, Hans Blix, reported to the UN Security Council that there was no evidence of either active chemical or biological weapons programs or stockpiles. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei reported that there was no evidence of a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. On the basis of leads provided by U.S. and other intelligence agencies and information gained from earlier inspections, the UN inspectors conducted more than 760 inspections covering about 500 sites from November 2002 through February 2003.
The UN inspectors’ findings directly contradicted key assessments of the October 2002 NIE and provided ample reason to reassess that document, which was based entirely on information gathered before the return of the UN inspectors in November of 2002.
To make matters worse, the IAEA’s findings are again being discounted in the current debate on Iran. And like the debate preceding the Iraq war, people seem to be taking it for granted that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program–even though the UN nuclear watch dog and our own intelligence agencies say this just is not so.