Weapons Inspection Quotes

Thinking back, I now wonder if our mistake may have been in not considering whether the reason Saddam Hussein was so secretive about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities was not because he had the weapons and wanted to conceal them, but because he did not have them and he wanted to hide that.

Dialogue is good, America used to talk to Iraq all the time. Members of Congress don't have any special skill in weapons inspection. However, if members could be accompanied by weapons inspection experts, that could be a step in the right direction.

I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.

We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.

U.N. weapons inspectors found empty chemical warheads in Iraq. So, the question everyone is asking now is how did Sean Penn miss this?

We expected, I expected to find actual usable, chemical or biological weapons after we entered Iraq.

I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now.

You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.

I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons...I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out.

I don't think it's surprising we will have to look for them. I'm confident that when the Iraq Survey Group has done its work we will find what's happened to those weapons because he had them.

The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories.

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

The purpose of the UN mechanism, this inspection mechanism, is not to engage in a cat and mouse game with Saddam Hussein and try to find weapons that the Iraqi government is working on concealing.

The U.S. has perverted the U.N. weapons process by using it as a tool to justify military actions, falsely so. ... The U.S. was using the inspection process as a trigger for war.

The reality is that Qaddafi has been trying to talk to us about his weapons system for years, and we ignored him. The Libyans even came to me about two years ago and offered me a chance to go through their facilities because they couldn't get anybody's attention here.

He tried to fool the United Nations, and did for 12 years, by hiding these weapons. And so, it's going to take time to find them. But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them, or hid them, we're going to find out the truth.

I served as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Let me tell you, it's tough to find out what the CIA is doing. They led us astray on the weapons of mass destruction that they said Saddam Hussein found. We sent out Collin Powell, Secretary of State, former National Security Counselor, chief of staff, four star general, couldn't find it out. I'd be reluctant to cut into term limits. I think if the voters would become informed and aroused, they could impose the proper limits on the guys who ought to be out.

Similarly, the press never tested many of the assumptions about WMDs. One of the great myths about the WMD issue is that everybody believed Iraq had them. Well, that's not true. There were a number of people in the intelligence community and the State Department who were skeptical, and many analysts in the Department of Energy were dubious about Iraq's nuclear capability. There were also people like Scott Ritter who were saying quite accurately what was going on.

We should be hell bent on getting those weapons of mass destruction, hell bent on having a credible approach to them, but we should try to do it in a way which keeps the world together and that achieves our goal which is removing the... defanging Saddam.