In My Time - Dick Cheney [217]
Almost as soon as I hung up, Don Rumsfeld called. He said the man in custody had been identified by a witness as Saddam, and there were plans to do a comparison of the prisoner’s DNA with DNA from one of Saddam’s late sons. If news of Saddam’s capture didn’t leak, he told me, an announcement would be made the next morning at 7:00 a.m. D.C. time.
Capturing Saddam was a major accomplishment.
On Air Force II watching Saddam Hussein on trial in Baghdad. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
The next day at a Baghdad press conference, when Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced simply, “We got him,” Iraqi journalists jumped to their feet, joyfully applauding and cheering. We hoped that having Saddam in custody would give the Iraqi people confidence that he and his Baathist regime were not coming back.
But we still had not found the stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons we had believed Saddam possessed.
AFTER WE LIBERATED IRAQ, we had set up the Iraq Survey Group, an organization made up of American, British, and Australian weapons experts, who were to hunt for Saddam’s WMD stockpiles and programs.
With Don Rumsfeld in his office at the Pentagon. We had just completed a video conference with the commanders in Iraq in the days before our forces took Baghdad. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)
David Kay, who had participated in the search for banned weapons in Iraq after the first Gulf War, was selected to lead the group. He reported directly to George Tenet, and throughout 2003 Kay updated us on the investigation’s progress.
In late July, Kay came to the White House to brief us on his investigation. He expressed confidence that he’d find weapons of mass destruction and confirmed the existence of research programs involving chemical and biological weapons. He was confident we’d find chemical weapons, but was less sure about biological weapons stockpiles. The footprint of a biological weapons program was very small and easy to hide or destroy.
In October, when Kay went before the House and Senate intelligence committees, he reported that while the Iraq Survey Group had not yet found “stocks of weapons,” they had discovered “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002,” including “a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing chemical and biological weapons research” and “a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of biological warfare agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.”
But by the time Kay resigned in January 2004, he said he no longer expected that we would find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He did not dismiss the threat Iraq had represented. “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war,” he said. Kay also said that Saddam had the intention of pursuing WMD activities, a conclusion echoed in the report of his successor, Charles Duelfer. According to Duelfer, “Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability . . . after sanctions were removed.” Duelfer cited Iraqi diplomat Tariq Aziz’s opinion that Saddam would have restarted WMD programs, beginning with the nuclear program, after sanctions and noted that Saddam had purposely retained the men and women who knew