<As war ends, hunt for WMDs in Iraq goes on

key quotes:

"If no WMD are found, then the fundamental justification for this war is not there, and there's going to have to be some real answers why we went to war and how did the U.S. make such a huge mistake about the WMD programs in Iraq."

"In October 2002, President Bush spoke in Cincinnati, Ohio, and displayed a satellite image of a facility called Al Furat. He said the picture revealed the rebuilding of a past nuclear facility -- which bolstered his contention that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

"The junked equipment left at the ravaged site seems to support the deposed Iraqi regime's claims that Al Furat was nothing more than a radio frequency testing and repair facility."

"Privately, inspectors told reporters they were frustrated by the bad intelligence information provided by the U.S. government. Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix hinted as much in a February 14 briefing to the U.N. Security Council."

"One of the questions about whether the U.S. government or officials lied is if the U.S. believed its own story, that there were so many weapons of mass destruction, you would expect them to be completely panicked right now, because they are not protected, and they could go easily missing and get into the hands of terrorists. And yet they're not panicked. So you do have to start to wonder whether the ... people who believed these stories, really were the American people and not the U.S. government."

If it turns out that the American people were lied to, the political capital with this issue will build.