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and the reporter, Gellman, squirmed uncomfortably througout the interview. here's the transcript:
BROWN: Art Gellman wrote the piece in the "Post" today the "Washington Post" that got all this attention. It is quite a piece of work by the looks of it and by the reaction it is getting. Mr. Gellman is in Washington tonight. He joins us from there and we're glad to have him.
It's 6,000 words I think. That's a lot of work and we're not going to cover it all. Let's look at some broad strokes. Do the inspectors, the American team, believe anymore that they will find a cache of weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical?
BARTON GELLMAN, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, "WASHINGTON POST": I'd have to say those expectations are months in the past neither a cache of active weapons, the lethal agents that make them up nor even active production lines for any of those weapons now look likely to be found in the inspector's own view.
BROWN: But what they have found is what? I mean I think a lot of, as I read the piece today, a lot of the pieces is on the one hand what the Americans thought they had or said they had and what the Iraqis really wanted to have if they could.
GELLMAN: There's definitely some deception been found by Iraq about aspirations or intentions or past desires or records they may have kept.
Saddam Hussein seems to have wanted to rebuild these programs. The question is whether he took active steps to do so and whether he was even capable of building the kinds of programs that worried the United States and the British government the most.
BROWN: On the first part, whether he took active steps, the answer is, sort of?
GELLMAN: Yes.
Look, I interviewed a missile scientists who had secret drawings, computer drawings and computations for a family of missiles that could eventually have struck at Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey. But they were drawings. They existed on compact disks. There were no actual missiles.
And experts that I spent many hours with evaluating his plans said that, if he could have built it at all, it would have taken six years. So the question is not whether they wanted them or took preliminary steps, or at least not only those things. It's also whether these missiles were something that would become part of Iraq's arsenal anytime soon.
BROWN: There's a key moment in this story which really plays out over a decade, where the -- one of Saddam's son-in-laws defects and he is debriefed extensively. The importance of that moment is?
GELLMAN: Look, everyone knew who has followed this for a long time that Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, gave away a big chunk of secrets when he left Iraq. The question is whether he gave away all of them, and especially on one point. Did Iraq destroy all the biological weapons agents that it produced before 1991? Iraq said yes. The United States and others doubted it for a long time. Now, what I came across was a new document. It's a handwritten damage report inside the Iraqi government that went to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son, saying, the son-in-law has defected. Here are all the secrets he knows that we haven't told anyone. And one of the secrets is that we destroyed all the biological weapons not when we said we did in 1990, but, in fact, the following summer in 1991.
But what it says, unambiguously, is, we destroyed all the biological weapons. And it was those same weapons that Colin Powell was referring to on February 5 when he said that Iraq still had, for instance, some thousands of liters left of anthrax.
BROWN: Does the reporting give us any clue as to why the American and presumably British intelligence was wrong?
GELLMAN: It's a really big, complicated question, and it offers only hints.
There's one intriguing element here that I came across and didn't expect to come across. And that is the extent to which Iraqi scientists and engineers and program managers seem to have been lying to their bosses and ultimately to Saddam Hussein. There was a lot of inflation of progress reports, a lot of creation of false progress reports. Generals and scientists and company managers told me that you just don't tell Saddam Hussein, no, what you want can't be done.
And so people would tell him, yes, we're doing it, yes, sir, it's happening. And so it appears that he received a lot of information that would exaggerate, in his own mind, the extent to which he had active programs. And it may be that some of that same information made its way out into Western intelligence reports.
BROWN: We appreciate your time tonight. It's a terrific piece of work. I assume it's still online, for people who don't have access to the paper, to the paper copy of the paper. They can go take a look at all of it. It's a nice piece of work. And, again, thank you.
GELLMAN: Thank you.
BROWN: Bart Gellman of "The Washington Post" tonight.
Still to come, we'll circle back to the president's immigration plan, a creative way, some will say, to deal with a real problem, or was just it a political-year gambit that rewards law-breakers? Both sides have a feel for this. And we'll hear from both sides.
Around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.
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