This account of the build-up to the Iraq war by Robert Kelley is a superb succinct summary. Still, to this day, no one has been held accountable for this devastating illegal invasion. Instead, as Kelley says, it’s passed off as ‘a story of faulty and inadequate intelligence, rather than robust and reliable intelligence information ignored.’ And the result was ‘a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and fueled years of instability in Iraq and around the region. The CIA spent a billion dollars looking for Iraq’s non-existent WMD programmes in 2003–2004 only to find that UNMOVIC and the IAEA had got it almost perfectly right.’
About the author:
Robert Kelley is a veteran of over 35 years in the US Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex, most recently at Los Alamos. He worked in research and engineering before turning to information analysis in the 1980s. He managed the centrifuge and plutonium metallurgy programs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and later was Director of the Department of Energy Remote Sensing Laboratory, the premier US nuclear emergency response organization. He was also seconded by the USDOE to the IAEA where he served twice as a Director of the nuclear inspections in Iraq in 1992 and again in 2001. Kelley is currently based in Vienna. He has carried out professional travel to more than 20 countries.
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