Were they even looking? (Insider Report).

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," stated President Bush in a televised March 17th address. Those weapons, insisted the president in a March 6th statement, posed an existential threat to the United States: "I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq began, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told reporters: "One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. There are a number of sites." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told ABC News on March 30th, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Months after the U.S.-led military coalition seized control of Iraq, no definitive evidence has emerged that the much-discussed WMDs exist. During a question-and-answer session following a May 27th address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Rumsfeld was asked about the missing WMDs. "It's a country the size of California," insisted Rumsfeld, reciting one of the administration's favorite talking points. "It is not as though we managed to look every place. There are hundreds and hundreds of suspect chemical or biological or nuclear sites that have not been investigated as yet. It'll take time."

If the administration is zealously turning over every rock in Iraq to find WMDs, why didn't they start with the most obvious site -- the state-owned al-Fatah company in Baghdad, which designed all of Saddam's missiles? According to the June 3rd issue of Newsday, "no U.S. weapons hunters or intelligence officials have visited the heart of Iraq's missile program.... Looters, however, have ransacked the place. The three-building complex has been stripped of everything from drafting tables to light switches."

"We have the most sensitive documents here," commented al-Fatah director-general Marouf al-Chalabi. "We were sure the Americans would target us but they haven't even dropped by." American missile experts told Newsday that "the al-Fatah company wasn't on any target list they had seen."