But - but - but - Rumsfeld said!

Is there anything left of the prewar claims? Anything at all?

U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday.

The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information - contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis - demonstrating that Saddam Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war. ...

Senior Iraqi scientists interviewed by Kay admitted hiding their chemical and biological weapons programs in the early 1990s. In 1995, however, Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who directed the illegal weapons programs, defected. At about that time, the scientists said they tried unsuccessfully to convince U.N. inspectors that they had destroyed their weapons and agents. They tried to "come clean, but we wouldn't believe them," Kay said.

Kay said the Iraqi scientists did not have complete records to back up their claims because the destruction had taken place under pressure to keep it secret from U.N. inspectors.

I remember than in the months before the war, when the US was trumpeting that Iraq has this much VX and that much anthrax, some noted that those figures actually were little more than a rephrasing of the discrepancy between what the UN inspectors believed Iraq had produced and what it could show that it destroyed. Hans Blix insisted that it didn't mean Saddam had such banned materials, just that they weren't accounted for. Naturally, the White House (and much of the media) ignored him.

At the time, I suggested pretty much what Kay has found. Recalling that Saddam had tried to avoid any acknowledgement of a biochem weapons program, I opined that the weapons had been destroyed but that the records of the destruction were themselves destroyed - because admitting how much was destroyed amounted to admitting how big the program had been, which at the time he was still denying.

Ah, me, it's such a burden being so insightful.

Update: With regard to my opening question, the New York Times for February 1 says

[i]nterviews with current and former senior intelligence officials, a handful of Iraqi engineers, Congressional officials involved in investigations of the C.I.A. and current and former administration officials, suggest that Mr. Powell's case was largely based on limited, fragmentary and mostly circumstantial evidence, with conclusions drawn on the basis of the little challenged assumption that Saddam Hussein would never dismantle old illicit weapons and would pursue new ones to the fullest extent possible

and concludes that the answer is "not much."

Updated update: Edited to correct a boo-boo on a date.