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Missed Signals On WMD?
The intelligence failure in Iraq began with U.N. weapons inspectors, who gathered detailed evidence that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction in 1991 but never presented those findings forcefully to the world, according to Iraq's top nuclear scientist.

Jafar Dhia Jafar, who ran Iraq's nuclear program from 1982 on, revealed new details of his country's dealings with U.N. inspectors in a telephone interview yesterday from the United Arab Emirates, where he now lives. His interview was the first broad, on-the-record discussion of WMD issues by a top Iraqi scientist since the end of the war.

Jafar said he has explained the 1991 termination of Iraqi WMD programs in more than 20 voluntary debriefings with U.S. officials since he left Iraq on April 7, 2003. The debriefings took place in the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. To confirm the accuracy of his account, he said, he volunteered to take a lengthy polygraph test, which U.S. officials administered....

... "The United Nations inspectors were on the ground. They were everywhere. They had access to all the documents," Jafar argued. "They knew the facts, and they should have said confidently that Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction."

Instead, he said, U.N. inspectors -- under apparent pressure from the United States and Britain to continue looking for weapons that had actually been destroyed -- kept asking for more time to conduct further searches. The Iraqis were never able to prove the negative.

If Jafar is right, the U.N. inspectors had detailed evidence to rebut the arguments about Iraqi WMD made in the intelligence dossiers compiled by Britain and the United States that were a main justification for their March 2003 invasion. In the supercharged political atmosphere before the war, that evidence was either diluted, suppressed or ignored....