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It proves Iraq was concealing equipment

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Actually, that's a pretty flimsy argument.

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the fact it hasn't been used for over a dozen years proves he did not have a nuclear program since that time.

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The more significant discoveries were related to Saddam�s attempts to rebuild chemical and biological arsenals like those he was known to have used during the Iran-Iraq War of the late 1980s, when he was supported by the U.S. government.

Sources told NBC News� Jim Miklaszewski that within just the past week, U.S. investigators had found two shipping containers filled with millions of much more recent documents relating to chemical and biological weapons.

One of the documents, from 2001, was titled �Document burial and U.N. activities in Iraq,� the sources said. It gave detailed instructions on how to hide materials and deceive U.N. weapons inspectors, the sources said.
Other documents related to the concealment of VX nerve gas, the sources said.

The sources said U.S. troops also discovered about 300 sacks of castor beans, which are used to make the deadly biological agent ricin, hidden in a warehouse in the town of al-Aziziyah, 50 miles southeast of Baghdad, the capital. The castor beans were inaccurately labeled as fertilizer.

U.S. search teams have also been led to a site near Nasiriyah, a key Euphrates River crossing 200 miles south of Baghdad, where Iraqi informants said Scud missiles were buried.

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WASHINGTON � There was a time when conservatives fought passionately to preserve America as a limited constitutional republic. That was, in fact, the essence of conservatism. It's one reason Franklin Roosevelt's vast expansion of government through the New Deal aroused such bitter opposition on the right.

But many conservative activists seem to have lost that philosophical commitment. They now advocate autocratic executive rule, largely unconstrained by constitutional procedures or popular opinions.

This curious attitude is evident in the conservative response to the gnawing question: Where are Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? A surprising number of conservatives respond: So what? He must have had them; maybe he gave them away. And, anyway, Hussein was a bad guy. In their view, even to ask the question is to mount a partisan attack on President Bush, and that's downright unpatriotic.It always seemed likely that Baghdad possessed WMD. Not only did Iraq once maintain a WMD program, but how else to explain the regime's obstructionist behavior during the inspections process?

Yet it made equal sense to assume that a desperate Hussein would use any WMD to defend his regime - and that serious elements of Baghdad's arsenal would be quickly found.

There may be a logical explanation for the fact that WMD were not used and have not been located; significant WMD stockpiles might eventually turn up.

Moreover, it's hard to imagine the administration simply concocting its WMD claims. The president, though a practiced politician, isn't the type to lie so blatantly. Whatever the faults of his lieutenants, none seems likely to advance a falsehood that would be so hard to maintain.

But the longer we go without any discoveries, the more questionable the prewar claims appear to have been. The allies have checked all of the sites originally targeted for inspection, arrested leading Baath Party members, and offered substantial rewards for information. Even in Hussein's centralized regime, more than a few people must have known where any WMD stocks were hidden or transferred and would be able to help now.

Which means it is entirely fair to ask the administration, where are the WMD? The answer matters for the simplest practical reasons. Possible intelligence failures need to be corrected. Washington's loss of credibility should be addressed; saying "trust me" will be much harder for this president in the future or a future president.

Stonewalling poses an even greater threat to our principles of government. It matters whether the president lied to the American people. Political fibs are common, not just about with whom presidents have had sex, but also to advance foreign-policy goals. Remember the Tonkin Gulf incident, inaccurate claims of Iraqi troop movements against Saudi Arabia before the first Gulf war, and repetition of false atrocity claims from ethnic Albanian guerrillas during the Kosovo war.

Perhaps the administration manipulated the evidence, choosing information that backed its view, turning assumptions into certainties, and hyping equivocal materials. That, too, would hardly be unusual. But no president should take the US into war under false pretenses. There is no more important decision: The American people deserve to hear official doubts as well as certitudes.

The point is not that the administration is necessarily guilty of misbehavior, but that it should be forced to defend its decisionmaking process.

Pointing to substitute justifications for the war just won't do. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz notes that the alleged Al Qaeda connection divided the administration internally, and humanitarian concerns did not warrant risking American lives. Only fear over Iraqi possession of WMD unified the administration, won the support of allies, particularly Britain, and served as the centerpiece of the administration's case. If the WMD didn't exist, or were ineffective, Washington's professed case for war collapses.

Conservatives' lack of interest in the WMD question takes an even more ominous turn when combined with general support for presidential warmaking. Republicans - think President Eisenhower, for instance - once took seriously the requirement that Congress declare war. These days, however, Republican presidents and legislators, backed by conservative intellectuals, routinely argue that the chief executive can unilaterally take America into war.

Thus, in their view, once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.

This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor.

It is foolish to turn the Iraq war, a prudential political question, into a philosophical test for conservatism. It is even worse to demand unthinking support for Bush. He should be pressed on the issue of WMD - by conservatives. Fidelity to the Constitution and republican government demands no less.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

Doug Bandow, The Christian Science Monitor

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LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair "misrepresented" the findings of intelligence information on Iraq's weapons program, but the government did not mislead the public ahead of the war, a parliamentary committee has found.

The committee on Monday cleared the government's communication director of any wrongdoing in the preparation of a dossier used to justify the UK joining the U.S.-led war against Iraq.

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"We conclude that the claims made in the September dossier were in all probability well founded on the basis of the intelligence then available," the committee said.

But it said the dossier "was in places more assertive than that traditionally used in intelligence documents."

The government has acknowledged that the 45-minute reference came from a single source. However, it said that source was thought to be reliable.

As for the February dossier, the committee concluded that Blair, in comments to the House of Commons, "misrepresented its status and thus inadvertently made a bad situation worse."

"We conclude that the effect of the February dossier was almost wholly counterproductive. By producing such a document the government undermined the credibility of their case for war and of other documents which were part of it," the committee said.

Parts of the February dossier were taken from a student's thesis which had been posted on the Internet.

But the committee believed that "ministers did not mislead Parliament."

"We conclude that it appeared likely that there was only limited access to reliable human intelligence in Iraq and that as a consequence the United Kingdom may have been heavily reliant on U.S. technical intelligence, on the defectors and on exiles with an agenda of their own."

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"We conclude that it is too soon to tell whether the government's assertions on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons will be borne out," the committee said.

"However, we have no doubt that the threat posed to United Kingdom forces was genuinely perceived as a real and present danger and that the steps taken to protect them were justified by the information available at the time."

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Former House of Commons leader Robin Cook has accused Campbell of using the row with the BBC to draw attention away from the coalition's failure to find any weapons.

"He has managed to convince half the media that the Foreign Affairs inquiry is into the origins of his war with (the BBC) ... not in to the war with Iraq," Cook told The Guardian newspaper Monday.

"The serious allegation is that they got it wrong, and they should not be allowed to get off answering that issue because Alastair has souped up this controversy," said Cook, who quit the cabinet before the war began.

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