whither wmd?

Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper (via Joe Conason's journal)

The Washington Post today ran an article about Iraq's WMDs (or rather, lack thereof), among other things citing a letter by Iraqi official Hossam Amin chronicling possible revelations brought to the U.S. by the 1995 defection of Saddam son-in-law Hussein Kamel.

The most significant point in Amin's letter, U.S. and European experts said, is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons. Amin reminded Qusay Hussein of the government's claim that it possessed no such arms after 1990, then wrote that in truth "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991."

It was those weapons to which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred in the Security Council on Feb. 5 when he said, for example, that Iraq still had an estimated 8,500 to 25,000 liters of anthrax bacteria.