This LA Times report says the embarrassed CIA Iraq Survey Group charged with finding WMD in Iraq will release a final report next month that shifts gears into speculating on what Iraq’s arsenal might have looked like by 2008 if the US had not invaded. The report is being assailed as a departure from the mandate of the group, as designed to obscure the fact that WMD were never found, as confusing the distinction between evidence and fanciful speculation, and as clearly politically motivated. It seems to me that David Kay (former director of the survey group)’s main problem was in resigning too soon. Of course, the dysadministration would try to repair the damage by putting in place a successor without his integrity who would be willing to have the group’s agenda hijacked in this manner. With the deceptions about WMD at the core of the growing outrage about the war and the change in dysadministration justification of the invasion from asserting Iraq had WMD to asserting it had intentions of and capability for weapons production, shouldn’t opponents have had their sights on what the Iraq Survey Group was doing for, oh, the past year or so? It was only last month that Congressional leaders were taken aback to learn of this plan in briefings from a representative of the weapons survey team who acknowledged (before moving on to another assignment and refusing to comment further) that its mandate indeed was “the search for and elimination of weapons of mass destruction.” While an outraged Representative’s request for assurances from John McLaughlin, interim director of the CIA, that the group’s report confine itself to what the search efforts in Iraq had actually yielded has gone unanswered, a CIA spokesperson dismissed charges that the shift in the group’s focus is politically motivated as [perhaps the most common phrase on the lips of government officials these days? &m-dash; FmH] “nonsense.”