"Sandman" wrote in message
...
From SignOnSanDiego, website of the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper (a
very politically conservative publication):


http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...E=CADIU&SECTIO
N=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Nov 30, 1:13 PM EST

Iraq Scientists: Lied About Nuke Weapons

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

Iraqi scientists never revived their long-dead nuclear bomb program, and
in
fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making
before
U.S.-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi
physicists
say.

Before that first Gulf War, the chief of the weapons program resorted to
"blatant exaggeration" in telling Iraq's president how much bomb material
was being produced, key scientist Imad Khadduri writes in a new book.

Other leading physicists, in Baghdad interviews, said the hope for an
Iraqi
atomic bomb was never realistic. "It was all like building sand castles,"
said Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences.

Seven months after a U.S.-British invasion toppled Saddam's Baath Party
government, Iraqi scientists have grown more vocal in countering Bush
administration claims, used to justify the war, that Baghdad had
"reconstituted" nuclear weapons development, and that it once was a mere
six
months from making a bomb.

At best, Khadduri writes, it would have taken Iraq several years to build
a
nuclear weapon if the 1991 war and subsequent U.N. inspections had not
intervened.

His self-published "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage," a chronicle of years of secret
weapons work and of a final escape into exile, is part of this senior
scientist's emergence from a low profile in Canada - intended to refute
what
he calls a "massive deception" in Washington that led the United States
into
war.


If Sadaam didn't know he was being lied to, how would you expect Rummie to
know teh state of Iraq's weapons?

Months of searching by hundreds of U.S. experts have found no trace of
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, just as U.N. inspectors
found none before the war.

The UN didn't find any after the Gulf War until an Iraqi defector told them
where to look.