Oh, that's why they didn't find any -- because they "were there"? Perhaps maybe you should revisit the Kay investigation results. If you're referring to those used years and years prior to Bush Jr's war, Possibilities and suspicions do not a case for guilt make, as the Kay report showed.
There were no legal "justifications" for the "no-fly zones" under international law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_no-fly_zones The UN still had control under the relevant resolutions, not the US or its allies, who only had authorization to remove him from Kuwait, not to violate the sovereignty those "no-fly zones" were.
MY "thining" has always been that it was never about anything but regime change for the obvious reasons, and the same it always is for empire -- resources. I was also "thinking" based on my recollection of the Kay report, etc, that SH destroyed his stuff, not "the inspectors". Perhaps maybe you should revisit the issue.
Saddam Hussein intended to retain a strategic deterrent capability, not only to take care of Iran, but also to focus on Israel. What he didn’t count on was the tenacity of the inspectors. And very rapidly by June 1991 we had compelled him into acknowledging that he had a nuclear weapons program, and we pushed him so hard that by the summer of 1991, in the same way that a drug dealer who has police knocking at his door flushes drugs down a toilet to get rid of his stash so that he can tell the cops, "I don’t have any drugs," the Iraqis, not wanting to admit that they lied, flushed their stash down the toilet. They blew up all of their weapons and buried it in the desert, and then tried to maintain the fiction that they had told the truth.
And by 1992 they were compelled again because of the tenacity of inspectors to come clean. People say why didn’t Saddam Hussein admit being disarmed? In 1992 they submitted a declaration that said everything’s been destroyed, we have nothing left. In 1995 they turned over the totality of their document cache. Again, not willingly, it took years of inspections to pressure them. But the bottom line is by 1995 there were no more weapons in Iraq, there were no more documents in Iraq, there was no more production capability in Iraq, because we were monitoring the totality of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure with the most technologically advanced, the most intrusive arms control regime in the history of arms control.
And we knew that while we couldn’t account for everything that the Iraqis said they had destroyed, we could only account for ninety to ninety-five percent, we knew that: (a) we had no evidence of a retained capability and, (b) no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting. And furthermore, the C.I.A. knew this. The British intelligence knew this; Israeli intelligence knew this; German intelligence. The whole world knew this. They weren’t going to say that Iraq was disarmed, because nobody could say that. But they definitely knew that the Iraqi capability regarding W.M.D. had been reduced to as near to zero as you could bring it and that Iraq represented a threat to no one when it came to weapons of mass destruction.
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/21/seymour_hersh_and_scott_ritter_on
all of which the Kay report validated as I recall.
So yeah, my thinking was an remains, that it was all about regime change to get western hands on Iraqi oil from the start/end of Desert Storm, whether you wanna quibble about it merely to "secure" it as a "stabalizing measure" or outta greed or not.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/09/17/uk-greenspan-idUKN1728646120070917
ANd was the CIA just fooled or was Bush, etc "lying"
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0217-12.htm ANd one things for sure -- we wouldn't have invaded without the threat of the "mushroom cloud".
have a good one dude -- gotta scoot
