“Cheney's bogus nuclear weapon"
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
By Imad Khadduri
Former Iraqi nuclear scientist
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (
(YellowTimes.org)
– On NBC's Meet the Press last Sunday, March
16, 2003, Vice President Cheney audaciously reiterated an ominous note.
NBC: "And
even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a
nuclear program, we disagree?"
Cheney: "I
disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our
intelligence community disagree. Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a
minute. … We know that based on intelligence, that [Saddam] has been
very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at
it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear
weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think
Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong."
After 218 inspections of 141 sites over three months by the International
Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei charged that
the U.S. had used faked and erroneous evidence to support the claims that Iraq
was importing enriched uranium and other material, notably the aluminum tubes and small magnets for the manufacture of nuclear
weapons. "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have, to date,
found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons
program in
In December
2002, the American and British intelligence communities did provide, under Blix's insistence, a list of 25 sites garnered from Iraqi
defectors and other intelligence sources. The inspectors visited all of these
sites, including one site that intelligence communities had claimed would be a
promising find. Tellingly, the inspectors found nothing and their "hush hush" information was referred to by one inspector as
"garbage after garbage after garbage."
So why is
Cheney, after the total disrepute of all American misinformation about a
rejuvenated Iraqi nuclear weapons program, still claiming that the U.S. has
untold intelligence information about this program?
I now tend to
believe there is a more sinister implication behind Cheney's continued
assertions so late in the misinformation campaign and so close to the war.
Would they not
want to reiterate up until the last minute, as Cheney seems to be doing, that
their "intelligence" does confirm that
However, in the
event that no such components are to be found in Iraq, would it not be past the
American intelligence community's bag of dirty tricks to place some bogus
evidence (in places where the inspectors have not been so they can't be refuted
by them) to vindicate the tens of billions of dollars spent on this war crime
and the devastation it will undoubtedly incur?
It would
otherwise be hard to challenge the timing and triviality of Cheney's claim on
March 16, with Bush declaring war only one day later on March 17.
[Imad Khadduri
has a MSc in Physics from the
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