So when is enough enough?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended last month, but the analysis of documents seized in the hunt continues, U.S. officials have said.Two thoughts:
Charles Duelfer, the CIA special adviser who led the investigation, has returned home and is expected next month to issue a final addendum to his September report that concluded pre-war Iraq had no WMD stockpiles, officials said.
Asked if Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, or ISG, had stopped actively searching for WMD, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "That's my understanding." He added, "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."
The Washington Post newspaper on Wednesday quoted ISG officials saying the violence in Iraq coupled with a lack of new information led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas -- nearly two years after President George W. Bush invaded the country, accusing it of a secret weapons program.
"The physical search is over. The team that did the physical search is back. But the document exploitation of documents found in Iraq continues. We found tonnes of documents," one U.S. official said.
But McClellan told reporters at a White House briefing that the ISG's mission in Iraq was not completely over.
"That group is still in Iraq and the multinational forces continue to oversee that group, and if they have any reports of WMD, obviously they'll continue to follow up on those reports," he said.
- Notice that although lack of evidence was one reason to stop the investigation, the violence in Iraq was the other reason given. The violence in Iraq that's happening as a result of our little "liberation."
- When some of us keep saying "We think there was fraud in our
elections. Let's investigate," they're told to give up,
already, even
though there's plenty of evidence that something was going on. But in
the complete absence of evidence for Iraq's WMDs, it's still
considered
normal, healthy, and sane to keep on digging! What's wrong with this
picture?
