September 6, 2003
The Globe and Mail

'Unaccounted for' Iraqi Weapons May be Bookkeeping Glitches

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. . . .

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[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