Democrats are calling for finding the 'truth' behind the CIA 'leak,' but I've got a feeling if the real truth is ever uncovered they're going to be embarrassed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to misstate the degree of success it achieved on dismantling Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear-bomb program during nuclear inspections in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, according to an analysis by the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a non-proliferation research and advocacy center.
“IAEA’s recent claims that they have ‘neutralized [Iraq’s] nuclear-weapon program’ and ‘destroyed all their key buildings and equipment’ related to weaponization are patently false, and the Agency’s own inspection reports prove it,” said Steven Dolley, NCI research director.
Dolley, citing IAEA’s own inspection reports as documentation, said: “Iraq has never surrendered to inspectors its two completed designs for a nuclear bomb, nuclear-bomb components such as explosive lenses and neutron initiators that it is known to have possessed, or almost any documentation of its efforts to enrich uranium to bomb-grade using gas centrifuges, devices which are small and readily concealed from reconnaissance.”[5]
Moreover, IAEA has previously conceded that Iraq’s weaponization R&D---small-scale technical research devoted to the design of a nuclear bomb’s components---is not readily detected by means of inspections. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei stated in 1998 that “no matter how comprehensive the inspection, any country-wide verification process, in Iraq or anywhere else, has a degree of uncertainty that aims to verify the absence of readily concealable objects such as small amounts of nuclear material or weapons components.”[6]
The IAEA’s own guidelines for the safeguarding of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium gives the conversion time for transforming these materials into weapons components as on the order of seven to ten days or one to three weeks, depending on the form the materials are in (metal, oxide or nitrate) when the materials are acquired by means of diversion or theft.[7] Thus, Iraq could be capable of producing a nuclear weapon in less than a month with sufficient diverted or stolen fissile material if it has managed to fabricate and conceal all of the non-nuclear components of a weapon.
The Agency’s own October 1997 review of its inspections in Iraq concluded that "Iraqi programme documentation records substantial progress in many important areas of nuclear weapon development, making it prudent to assume that Iraq has developed the capability to design and fabricate a basic fission weapon, based on implosion technology and fueled by highly enriched uranium."
“THERE THEY GO AGAIN”: IA.E.A. MISSTATES ITS RECORD ON DISMANTLING SADDAM’S NUCLEAR-BOMB PROGRAM
An unsigned CIA memo on Oct. 5 advised that "the CIA had reservations about the British reporting" on Iraq's alleged attempts in Niger, Hadley said [No. 2 on Bush's national security team]. A second memo, sent on Oct. 6, elaborated on the CIA's doubts, describing "some weakness in the evidence," such as the fact that Iraq already had a large stock of uranium and probably wouldn't need more, Hadley said.
The CIA abruptly removed from its Web site photos that showed key uranium enriching equipment found hidden in Iraq because they revealed secrets that countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons might find helpful, analysts said on Monday.
The CIA on Thursday had posted on its Web site a statement and six photos of centrifuge parts which had been hidden for 12 years under a rosebush in the garden of an Iraqi scientist, Mahdi Shukur Ubaydi.
I missed this article by Sy Hersh but I don't know if you have seen it or not.
(* My note: Poor Sy, citing Shakir al-Khafaji- the guy who is caught up, like Samir Vincent, in the Oil for Food scandal for taking oil voucher bribes from Saddam Hussein.)
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates.
(* My note: So, why didn't the UAE turn him over to us later on? Or was he safely in Europe's liberal arms by that time?)
Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh.
(* My note: why d we let an eyewitness take notes? How many people do we let get in on these things?)
The notes continued: Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions from the Top Man —“give them everything.”
(* My note: Explain again why there was harassment of inspectors, bribery, and generally no cooperation whatsoever on Iraq's part again?)
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
(* My note: Ah. I see, he knows because of aled hearsay.)
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons: Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
(* My note: Not even for a little bit o' blackmail against Iraq's neighbors?)
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
(*My note: Sure he did! </sarcasm>
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it.
(*My note: Ya think? Particularly a guy who fled - and was allowed to flee Iraq before the war to avoid being netted by the US or perhaps killed by the regime to cover their tracks?)
But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A....
(* My note: Hersh seriously wants us to accept Jaffar as credible because a French hack in the AEIA endorses his integrity? This, knowing France's history of supporting Hussein to make arms sales?)
bttt