by Associated Press
New York -- No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq,
nor has any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or
London.
But what about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping -- the gaps that led
United Nations inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons
material as unaccounted for?
Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the
notorious "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork
glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and
biological weapons years ago.
Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi
underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on
arms output in the 1980s. . . .
FULL TEXT
[A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that
the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion
dollars in monies spent.--Tom Abate, "Military waste under fire: $1 trillion missing,"
San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003]
[Efforts by the Iraq Survey Group, an Anglo-American team of 1,400
scientists, military and intelligence experts, to scour Iraq for the
past four months to uncover evidence of chemical or biological
weapons have so far ended in failure.
British defence intelligence sources confirmed last week that the
final report, which is to be submitted by David Kay, the survey
group's leader, to George Tenet, head of the CIA, had been delayed
and may not necessarily even be published.--David Leppard, "Iraq weapons report shelved," Times (UK), September 14,
2003]
[The key to uncovering the true size of the black budget are the chronic
accounting anomalies in the DoD budget that reveal that as much as one
trillion US dollars is annually being siphoned by the CIA into the DoD for
secret distribution to various military intelligence agencies and the 'deep
black' programs they respectively support. All of this, it will be argued,
has dubious constitutional status but is made legal by the various
Congressional enactments, senior Congressional officials and the Executive
Office. It will be finally argued that the size of black budget, the secrecy
surrounding it, the extent senior officials in Federal agencies go to
targeting individuals and companies that threaten to reveal where
Congressional appropriations are ultimately going, suggest a vast network of
'deep black projects' that collectively form a highly classified second
Manhattan Project whose existence, goals and budget are kept
secret.--Michael E. Salla, "The Black Budget
Report: An Investigation into the CIA's 'Black Budget' and the Second
Manhattan Project," American University, November 23, 2003]
VIDEO: "Still
Chasing Saddam's Weapons," BBC Panorama, November 23, 2003