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"Qusay (Hussein) had ordered [Sada] to execute all the pilots," Eberly said. "But Georges wouldn't do it. He argued that the rights accorded to prisoners under the Geneva Convention were inviolable." Eberly said Sada was arrested on Jan. 25, 1991, by the Iraqi Republican Guard and held prisoner. Sada said Saddam eventually changed his mind about the executions, probably because he realized the killings would galvanize world opinion against him.

Hoekstra believes details on pre-war Iraq are "cloudy" and that more should be done to gain a "clearer sense of what was happening in pre-war Iraq," Ware said. "A lot of people reached deterministic conclusions, but there is evidence that still needs to be checked before final conclusions [are made] on WMD and Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorists."

Hoekstra is pushing for the declassification of select documents and debriefing of relevant officials from Saddam Hussein's regime. "All these things are critical elements," said Ware.

David Kay, who as head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), led the CIA's hunt for WMD in Iraq until December 2003, made headlines in January 2004 when he asserted that pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMD had been "almost all wrong." Kay added that he himself had previously believed there were WMD in Iraq, and that intelligence from various countries like Germany and France indicated the same thing.

In October 2004 Kay told National Public Radio (NPR) that "There is no evidence of any transfer of weapons material to Syria, and certainly not of weapons, in the lead-up to the Gulf War, although that's an area that will always have some ambiguity because the Syrians, to say the least, have not been cooperative in running down any leads in Syria.

"The bulk of the evidence really points to -- that things did go to Syria, but they weren't weapons of mass destruction or weapons material," Kay added. He said there is "no evidence" that Iraq ever produced any large amounts of chemical nerve agents after 1991. "In fact, all the evidence is just the opposite," he told NPR.

Kay was succeeded by Charles Duelfer, whose 1,500-page October 2004 report on WMD bore many similarities.

"There were no WMD stockpiles; my conclusion, Charles Duelfer's conclusion," Kay said. He and Duelfer asserted that Saddam's regime maintained a vague intention to resume WMD production at some point and for that reason had attempted to hold on to "intellectual capital" related to the programs.

Those conclusions were made in spite of the congressional testimony in 2002 from Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidhir Hamza, who suggested Iraq might have a nuclear weapon by 2005. Hamza defected to the U.S. from Iraq in 1994.

Richard Butler, former head of the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq, gave similar testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "What there is now is evidence that Saddam has reinvigorated his nuclear weapons program," Butler said. He also reported that Iraq had an extensive chemical weapons program and had tested various ways to deliver biological weapons.

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