August 7, 2001: The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) published a secret report on “Iraq’s Reemerging Nuclear Weapon Program,” part of a raging debate within U.S. intelligence community agencies as to the state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program.<\/p>\n
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United Nations inspectors had been banned from inside the country since November 1998, leaving U.S. intelligence to largely speculate as to what was going on.<\/p>\n
Intelligence thereafter poured in from the intense American monitoring of Iraq, from regional allies (particularly Israel and Jordan) as well as the Iraqi expatriate community, suggesting that Iraq was pursuing nuclear and biological weapons as well as long-range missile\u2014a phantom that would build in intensity after 9\/11.<\/p>\n
The high priority intelligence collection supported the basic American policy\u2014and the U.N. requirement\u2014to eliminate all of Iraq’s WMD.<\/p>\n
Before the events that forced Saddam to eject U.N. inspectors\u2014a combination of increasing aggressiveness on the part of the singularly focused U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), the discovery of U.S. spying under the guise of the inspection effort\u2014Iraq had been about to receive a clean bill.<\/p>\n
We now know that U.S. intelligence not only misread the situation but that much of the reason that Washington (under the Bush and Clinton administrations) believed Saddam was secretly pursuing WMD was that he was lying to his own generals and diplomats, telling them that Iraq indeed had such a capability, hoping the lie would deter major attack and keep him in power.<\/p>\n
The main issue on the table on August 7 was the purpose of aluminum tubes that Iraq attempted to import from China, the 3,000 tubs intercepted in Jordan in July.<\/p>\n
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