UN Inspectors Vindicated - No WMD Found. by Julian Borger The Guardian / UK 8:52pm 3rd Oct, 2003   October 3, 2003    The conclusions from the Iraq Survey Group were, as US officials repeatedly insisted, only an interim report. The search would continue with the help of a further $600m (£360m). But long before the group arrived in Iraq, it was the most scrutinised country on the planet.    That process began on June 9 1991, when the UN special commission on Iraq (Unscom) began its first chemical weapons inspection in the wake of the Gulf war. The impact of that work was confirmed in the small print of yesterday's report. Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was largely, if not completely, eradicated during that period. By 1995, Unscom's biological team had dug up enough evidence to force Baghdad into admitting that it had a programme to produce biological agents.    Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency, discovered that Baghdad had been within six months of producing a nuclear weapon at the time of the Gulf war, but later satisfied itself that the programme had been dismantled.    But much of Saddam Hussein's prewar arsenal could not be accounted for and the UN demanded proof from Baghdad that it had destroyed the outstanding weapons. Unscom and the IAEA were aware that Saddam retained the capacity to reconstitute his weapons programme and installed sensors and cameras at key sites. That system broke down after Unscom's departure in December 1998, as tensions mounted between the UN and Baghdad. The exodus was followed by US and British air strikes and the end of Unscom.    Its successor, the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission (Unmovic), was born a year later as the international community grew uneasy over what Iraq might be up to. Baghdad relented and inspections resumed on November 27 2002. There were 731 inspections over the next four months at 411 sites.    Once Baghdad had fallen, the US military gave the job of looking for the elusive weapons to an almost-exclusively American unit, the 75th Exploitation Taskforce, known as the XTF.    Without an Iraqi government with which to negotiate, the XTF would have free rein to ransack the country. The Pentagon thought the task would be easy. But the hunt was a debacle. They treated scientists who cooperated as criminals, locking them up and cutting them off from their families. Cooperation dried up.    Under fire at home for making false arguments for war, the Bush administration asked David Kay, an American former UN inspector, to oversee a new unit, the Iraq Survey Group. It was assigned more than 1,200 staff, comprising experts and support workers from the US, Britain and Australia. Its budget of $300m for its initial three months' work was about five times the annual Unmovic budget.    For all that, the ISG has basically confirmed Unscom and Unmovic's conclusions Visit the related web page
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