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.

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. No Iraqi scientists have confirmed the programs
were revived in recent years.

Bush administration officials still speak, nonetheless, of a threat from
such weapons - of Baghdad's "robust plans" for them, as Vice President Dick
Cheney puts it - in defending last March's U.S. invasion of Iraq. They offer
no hard evidence, however.

Khadduri, a U.S.- and British-educated physicist, writes that he did
theoretical work on nuclear weapons as long ago as the mid-1970s, after
joining Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission. By the late 1980s, as the secret
bomb program accelerated, he was in a pivotal position as coordinator of all
its scientific and engineering information.

The U.N. inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who
dismantled the bomb program after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 war, saw
Khadduri as a key source and conducted an all-day interview with him earlier
this year in Toronto, where he has resided since 1998.

"Iraq's Nuclear Mirage," available via online booksellers, dismisses the
U.S. contention that the atom-bomb establishment was somehow resurrected
after the IAEA demolished it, U.N. inspectors were stationed in Iraq and
Iraqi specialists were scattered.

"Where is the scientific and engineering staff required for such an enormous
effort?" he asks. "Where are the buildings and infrastructure?"

The continuing U.S. weapons hunt amounts to no more than "investigating
mirages," he says.

An ex-bombmaker still in Iraq is just as dismissive of the unsubstantiated
U.S. allegations.

"There was no point in trying to revive this program. There was no material,
no equipment, no scientists," former bomb designer Sabah Abdul Noor said in
a recent interview at Baghdad's Technology University.

"Scientists were scattered and under the eyes of inspectors, totally
scattered. To do a project, you have to be together."

Talib, the newly elected university dean, was an anti-Baathist who didn't
participate in the bomb program, but was close to many who did. They vastly
oversold their accomplishments before 1991, the physicist said.

"They put a lot of lies on Saddam Hussein," he said in a Baghdad interview.
"They took a lot of money out of him through what you call, in English,
bluffing." When their installations were finally demolished, it "saved their
necks" by burying their mistakes, he said. "They could tell Saddam, `There's
nothing left.'"

Khadduri, in his core position in the program, could attest to the
overselling.

He writes that when he transferred top-secret documents of bomb program
chief Jafar Dhia Jafar to an optical disc in 1991, he found the "blatant
exaggeration" in a 1990 report to Saddam.

With its clever wording, Khadduri said in a telephone interview from
Toronto, "one could easily have been convinced we had produced a couple of
kilograms of enriched uranium instead of a couple of grams" - that is, about
four pounds of bomb material instead of a fraction of an ounce.

A bomb would have required some 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium.

In a 1997 summary, the IAEA said there were no indications the Iraqis ever
produced more than a few grams of such material. It also said there were "no
indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the
production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical
significance."

Khadduri and others said the design and actual production of a bomb would
have been an extremely difficult task.

It was an impossible quest, "all futility," said one of Baghdad's senior
nuclear physicists, Hamed M. al-Bahili.

Al-Bahili, who joined the Atomic Energy Commission in 1968 but remained
outside the weapons program, said his colleagues inside "all knew they
wouldn't achieve results." As for whether the program was later revived, he
said, "these American inspectors are wasting their time."

"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.