The report on Saddam's WMDs is already in.

Forget the long overdue report from US-appointed weapons inspector David Kay, whose 400-strong team has just withdrawn from Iraq without a whisper. Everything you ever wanted to know about WMDs is right here in this 5-page Washington Post report:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60340-2004Jan6.html

The article shows that:

- Saddam did not have the ability to produce nuclear, chemical or other WMDs.

- Iraq almost certainly destroyed all chemical and biological weapons in 1991 (after the first Gulf War), whether Saddam knew it or not.

- Iraqi scientists routinely misled Saddam as a means of maintaining funding for projects which were never capable of producing WMDs.

- A defecting Iraqi general, Hussein Kamel, gave Western intelligence complete details of the state of Saddam's weapons programs in 1995, but was not believed.

- Iraq was not even capable of producing the kind of long-range missiles that could deliver such WMDs to targets like Tel Aviv, and was in fact still "six years away" from such capability.

Couple the Post article with a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal think tank in Washington, and the following conclusions are now certainly beyond question:

1. There were no WMDs, there was no connection with Al Quaeda or other terrorists and the UN inspections were working very successfully.

2. The CIA and other intelligence providers did not have clear and reliable evidence about Saddam's weapons capability. They did not have any reliable sources in Iraq, they did not have a clear understanding of basic cultural and social conditions in Iraq, they didn't even have adequate language skills. Given the amount of taxpayers' money these spooks get every year, that is unacceptable.

3. These same intelligence providers allowed their information, flawed as it was, to be deliberately misrepresented for political purposes. Those who spoke out were chastized by their superiors. Why?

4. Bush, Blair and Howard deliberately ignored caveats from these intelligence sources and knowingly constructed a raft of phoney reasons for going to war with Iraq. This begs the question, what were their real reasons? If the Bush-ites claim (as they now belatedly do) that their objective was simply to remove a cruel dictator, why could they not say that beforehand?