Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.

The CIA plans for the report, due next month, to project as far as 2008 what Iraq might have achieved in its illegal weapons programs if the United States had not invaded the country last year, the officials said.

The new direction of the inquiry is seen by some officials as an attempt to obscure the fact that no banned weapons — or even evidence of active programs — have been found, and instead emphasize theories that Iraq may have been planning to revive its programs.

[CIA Study on Iraq Weapons Is Off Course]

I was afraid of something like this when David Kay resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) and was replaced by Charles Duelfer from the Woodrow Wilson International Center last January.

The original mission of the ISG was to look for evidence of Iraq's claimed weapons of mass destruction, not to speculate on might-have-beens:

David Kay, who led the group before resigning in January, said that speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the team's mission.

"Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should have been done. [CIA Study on Iraq Weapons Is Off Course]

Dr. Kay's account was supported as recently as last May by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the military commander of the weapons search group at the time:

In a media briefing in May describing the formation of the survey group, Dayton said its mission was "the search for and elimination of weapons of mass destruction." [CIA Study on Iraq Weapons Is Off Course]

Letters to the editor puts the CIA spin attempt in perspective:

By this logic, would not Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor also be retroactively justified, based on the fact that the U.S. was able to develop and employ the atomic bomb by 1945? [1]

But why stop there? Also in the works should be a what-if report on Iraq. What if U.S. involvement had not helped Hussein hold his power and what if the U.S. had not supplied chemical weapon technology to Iraq? [2][Retroactive Justification for the Invasion of Iraq subscription]

This administration is clearly playing ideological politics with millions of lives. And somebody wants a single individual to control all the security agencies?

Write your Senators and House Representative and tell them what you think.

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