Thanks to Cassandra for referencing Daniel McKivergan – a concise summary of the danger of false negatives in the intelligence field. E.g., how close Saddam was to operational nuclear weapons in 1991 (12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as the CIA estimated).
Recall also that, in spite of inspections, U.S. intelligence was unaware of the advanced state of the Iraqi biological weapons program until it was revealed by the 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and head of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization.
For more on duping inspectors, see this Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Inside Saddam’s secret nuclear program: A senior Iraqi scientist tells how Saddam Hussein, in a decades-long quest for the bomb, systematically hoodwinked the IAEA.
Kamel was, of course, murdered by Saddam when he returned to Iraq in 1996.
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