9/16/03
IRAQI WEAPONS
OF MASS DESTRUCTION UPDATE
By J. Parnell McCarter
In the months leading up to the Iraqi war we reported on the
evidence indicating that the Bush Administration had, at the least, significantly
exaggerated the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We had also reported how many of the weapons
of mass destruction which Iraq had purchased before the first Persian Gulf War
were actually “made in America”.
There is now even more reason to believe that the Bush
Administration mischaracterized the status of weapons of mass destruction in
the months leading up to the Iraq War.
As the Christian Science Monitor reports (see http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/monitor1.html
):
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updated 12:10 p.m. ET September 15, 2003
…the Sunday
Times of London, and other publications, say that the report has been delayed "indefinitely" because the group
was unable to get any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. David Kay, the leader of the Iraq Survey
Group, had hinted in July that he had seen enough to convince him that ousted
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did have a program to produce weapons of mass
destruction. But last week British officials said they believed Kay had been
"kite-flying" and that no hard evidence had been uncovered.
The Sunday Times report comes two days after NBC reported that
the search for WMD in Iraq had "been a bust."
"He [David Kay] has not
found the kinds of things the administration expected to find - large
quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that were destroyed
prior to the war," David Albright, a former UN weapons' inspector, told NBC
News.
The National Post (of Canada)
reports that senior UN weapons inspectors now think that Mr. Hussein may have
been telling the truth when he said he had no weapons of mass
destruction. "With this long period, I'm inclined to think that the Iraqi
statement that they destroyed all the biological and chemical weapons, which
they had in the summer of 1991, may well be the truth," said recently
retired UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.
"[The US and Britain] would
have hoped and they would have been happy to see if we had said, 'Here Iraq has
violated, here they have, here is the smoking gun. We have found it," Mr.
Blix said. "And when we didn't do that, well, then they were disappointed
and then they overinterpreted their own intelligence."
News 24 of South Africa reports that
other ex-inspectors now believe that the notorious "unaccountables"
(weapons Iraq said they could not account for) may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned
chemical and biological weapons after the first Gulf War.
Bush administration officials continued to defend their WMD claims. During
the weekend Vice President Dick Cheney said WMD would
be found in Iraw. In a speech last Friday to soldiers returning from Iraq,
President Bush repeated his charge that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.
The interpretation of intelligence about WMD has once again become a hot
topic in Britain. The Guardian reports that British PM Tony Blair was
definitely warned by his intelligence services not to exaggerate claims about WMD in Iraq, or else he would
misrepresent the situation. Also, a new government report said that the same
intelligence services warned Blair that it was more likely terrorists would get their hands on WMD if the US
and Britain invaded Iraq (because of the confusion resulting from an invasion),
than if they did not.
The BBC reports that Mr. Blair's decision
to ignore the findings of his intelligence service was defended by Health
Minister John Reid, one of Blair's most loyal supporters. But no sooner had
these reports surfaced when other damaging stories appeared about the Blair
government. Excerpts from "Blair's War," a new book by political
journalist John Kampfner, were published in the Mail on Sunday. The book
alleges that days before the Iraq war began, Britain's foreign secretary Jack
Straw asked Prime Minister Tony Blair not to send British troops to the conflict. Instead, Mr.
Straw wanted Britain to offer the US "moral support." The British Foreign Office issued a
statement Sunday that did not deny the story, but said Straw remains convinced that
military action against Iraq was the right decision.
The Independent reports that Blair's decision to go to war is being questioned by Labour Party aides throughout Britain, many of whom believed Blair lied to them about the war. The Independent also said it is likely that Blair's Iraq policies will be condemned by his own party when it holds its annual convention next week.
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In point of fact, correspondent Al Hembd
had predicted this conclusion before the Iraqi War commenced, based upon spectrographic
evidence presented by former UN inspector Scott Ritter. Spectrography can be done from space, via
military satellite, with respect to biochemical weapons. They give off an
unmistakable spectrograph that is easily detectible from space, especially over
a desert country like Iraq. Ritter also had noted how the UN inspectors
were using spectrographs to note possible emissions. Available evidence
indicated there have been no emissions of any kind from Iraq since 1997. And
when one considers that VBX gas has a shelf-life of eight days, then you know
that Saddam would have had to have been cranking that stuff out regularly to
keep a stock on hand. The Bush Administration, on the other hand, was
claiming that Saddam had tons of it. This is why Ritter and others knew
information was being falsified by the Bush Administration.