the Iraq Survey Group is still searching for WMD

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1231152,00.html
Amid all this mass clear-out of failures and lies, however, there is one mysterious omission. A secretive CIA-led intelligence body set up to look for stockpiles of Saddam's secret weapons, the Iraq Survey Group, is still going strong. This is despite the resignation of its head, David Kay, last January, who said with admirable crispness: "We were all wrong."

Tony Blair puzzled observers at his press conference last week by reviving the supposedly long-dead ghost of the ISG. He said he still believed the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction had been "accurate", and he urged the world to wait for yet another ISG report.

Claims like this seem, on the face of it, to make the phrase "in denial" barely adequate to the psychiatric depths of the occasion. Surely someone who still wants us to wait for the Iraq Survey Group's final findings must be suffering from delusions on a psychotic scale?

Dr Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University specialist in WMD, thinks the attempt at commercial recruitment appears to be a novelty: "In the past, the ISG relied on personal contacts to find people either from the CIA or from former Unscom inspectors," he said. It is possible, he adds, that the ISG has found some significant new leads. "It seems they are trying to recruit senior-level people, especially in the nuclear field."

Duelfer himself struck a bullish note to CNN last week. He denied that he was engaged in a continued wild goose chase. "A wild goose chase is when you are looking for something that may not exist," he said. "We're looking for something that does exist, and that is the truth."

But he made clear that the original hunt for apples has now covertly mutated into a quest for oranges. "You know I wasn't sent here to find weapons of mass destruction," Duelfer said. "I was sent out here to find the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programmes."

Whitehall expects the ISG to publish its final report next month. If it does so, the question may at last be answered: does Mr Blair know something important that we all don't? Or has he finally flipped over the edge into a world quite disconnected from reality?