Saddam builds new atom bomb
well you liberals who continue to kiss the the rear ends
of bill and al take note, your 15yr olds are in the cross
hairs of their foreign policies. within this decade the
blood of Americans will be on your hands for being so blind
and foolish to what is going on outside your little world.
story from the sunday times. uk
Saddam builds new atom bomb
Marie Colvin, Amman
SADDAM HUSSEIN has ordered his scientists to resume work
on a programme aimed at making a nuclear bomb, a defector
warned yesterday.
The Iraqi dictator, whose efforts to make atomic weapons were
thwarted by United Nations inspectors after the Gulf war in
1991, revived the plans two years ago, the defector said.
Scientists who had previously worked on the weapons
programme were made to return to their duties in August 1998,
four months before Saddam expelled the inspectors.
According to Salman Yassin Zweir, a design engineer who was
employed by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission for 13 years,
the instruction came in a document marked "top secret" which
identified a research centre on Al-Jadriya Street, Baghdad, as
the headqarters of the new operation.
Zweir was arrested and tortured after refusing to go back to the
programme. He escaped to Jordan, where he spoke for the first
time last week after being reunited with his wife, who was also
tortured, and their two sons, aged seven and six.
"Saddam is very proud of his nuclear team," said Zweir, 39. "He
will never give up the dream of being the first Arab leader to
have a nuclear bomb."
American intelligence officials will now debrief Zweir, whose
information will raise international concern that Saddam is
intent on developing weapons of mass destruction.
Colin Powell, the retired Gulf war general named by
President-elect George W Bush as the next secretary of state,
is expected to use the threat to press the case in Europe for
America's so-called "son of star wars" national missile defence
system.
A senior western diplomat said last night: "This is the first
concrete evidence of what we feared might be happening."
Zweir will also be interviewed by officials from the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, which carried out
more than 1,000 inspections between 1991 and 1997 to satisfy
the UN security council that everything possible had been done
to dismantle Iraq's nuclear weapons programme.
"We will investigate the evidence," said Hans Meyer, a
spokesman.
Zweir graduated from Baghdad University and joined the atomic
energy commission in 1985 as a mechanical engineer on a
salary of $1,000 a month, double the money earned by an
average government official with 15 years' experience.
He signed an agreement that made it clear he would be
executed if ever he left his job or revealed Iraq's nuclear
secrets. "As of today, I have broken both conditions," he said.
As a member of Iraq's scientific elite, Zweir had a comfortable
government villa in the Khairallah Tulfah complex in Baghdad.
Security agents drove him to work and back daily, and he
assumed that both his house and his car were bugged.
Zweir worked on two methods of producing highly enriched
uranium for a nuclear weapon. According to UN inspectors, the
commission was between one and four years away from
making a bomb when its main facilities were destroyed in the
Gulf war.
Based at a complex named al-Krayat on the Tigris River on the
outskirts of Baghdad, Zweir helped design gas centrifuges that
yielded small amounts of highly enriched uranium, although not
enough for a bomb.
For part of the time, Zweir worked under Dr Jaafar Jaafar, the
head of the atomic commission. The weapons programme,
known as Project 3000, was supervised by Hussein Kamel,
Saddam's son-in-law, who was later executed.
Kamel put the team under enormous pressure, Zweir said. "He
would say, 'You must complete this work in three months.'
There was no life outside work."
After the Gulf war halted the programme, Iraq at first denied
that it had existed. In a little-noticed speech last September,
however, Saddam said his nuclear scientists were part of the
fight against Iraq's enemies.
Zweir said the Iraqi security service had moved technical
components around during and after the war to conceal them
from allied bombers and, later, from UN inspectors. "Only
section heads could speak to the inspectors," he said. "They
lied and lied and lied."
The first Zweir knew of the resumption of the weapons
programme was an order to leave his work on civilian projects,
including a suspension bridge in Baghdad, and report to the
atomic commisson's engineering design unit. The order was
signed by Mehdi Shuqr Ghali, the programme's director.
"I felt I was being asked to participate in a filthy act," he said. "I
could not do it."
Within hours of his refusal to rejoin, he was arrested in his
office and taken to a military intelligence prison at al-Kadamiya.
He was punched, kicked and beaten with iron bars for three
weeks.
After losing consciousness, he was taken to hospital,
apparently because his jailers did not want him to die.
Following the intervention of a hospital employee who knew his
family, he was smuggled to a farm in southern Iraq and fled to
Jordan in October 1998.
Charles Duelfer, the former deputy head of UN inspectors in
Iraq, said last night he was "very concerned" to hear Zweir's
story. "When we were working in Iraq there was a pattern that
appeared to show ongoing research, but we never found direct
evidence," he said.
Powell indicated last week that he would resist growing
international pressure to lift UN sanctions against Iraq until
Saddam accounted fully for all weapons of mass destruction.
"We're doing this to protect the people of the region . . . who
would be the targets of these weapons if we did not contain
them and eliminate them," he said. |
