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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (73074)	2/11/2003 6:12:29 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

If Saddam's bomb maker doesn't know Saddam on WWD, who does? THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD Inspections Are A Total Waste of Time Saddam's "acceptance" of U-2 surveillance only shows his confidence in his deception. BY KHIDHIR HAMZA Tuesday, February 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. My 20 years of work in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program and military industry were partly a training course in methods of deception and camouflage to keep the program secret. Given what I know about Saddam Hussein's commitment to developing and using weapons of mass destruction, the following two points are abundantly clear to me: First, the U.N. weapons inspectors will not find anything Saddam does not want them to find. Second, France, Germany, and to a degree, Russia, are opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq mainly because they maintain lucrative trade deals with Baghdad, many of which are arms-related. Since the passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 we have witnessed a tiny team of inspectors with a supposedly stronger mandate begging Iraq to disclose its weapons stockpiles and commence disarmament. The question that nags me is: How can a team of 200 inspectors "disarm" Iraq when 6,000 inspectors could not do so in the previous seven years of inspection? Put simply, surprise inspections no longer work. With the Iraqis' current level of mobility and intelligence the whole point of inspecting sites is moot. This was made perfectly clear by Colin Powell in his presentation before the U.N. last week. But the inspectors, mindless of these changes, are still visiting old sites and interviewing marginal scientists. I can assure you, the core of Iraq's nuclear-weapons program has not even been touched. Yesterday's news that Iraq will "accept" U-2 surveillance flights is another sign that Saddam has confidence in his ability to hide what he's got. Meanwhile, the time U.N. inspectors could have used gathering intelligence by interviewing scientists outside Iraq is running out. The problem is that there is nothing Saddam can declare that will provide any level of assurance of disarmament. If he delivers the 8,500 liters of anthrax that he now admits to having, he will still not be in compliance because the growth media he imported to grow it can produce 25,000 liters. Iraq must account for the growth media and its products; it is doing neither. Iraq's attempt to import aluminum tubes of higher tensile strength than is needed in conventional weapons has been brushed aside by the IAEA's Mohammed El-Baradei. He claims there is no proof that these tubes were intended for modification and use in centrifuges to make enriched uranium. Yet he fails to report that Iraq has the machining equipment to thin these tubes down to the required thickness (less than one millimeter) for an efficient centrifuge rotor. What's more, they don't find it suspect that Iraq did not deliver all the computer controlled machining equipment that it imported from the British-based, Iraqi-owned Matrix-Churchill that manufacture these units. Mr. Blix also discounted the discovery of a number of "empty" chemical-weapons warheads. What he failed to mention is that empty is the only way to store these weapon parts. The warheads in question were not designed to store chemicals for long periods. They have a much higher possibility of leakage and corrosion than conventional warheads. Separate storage for the poisons is a standard practice in Iraq, since the Special Security Organization that guards Saddam also controls the storage and inventory of these chemicals. What has become obvious is that the U.N. inspection process was designed to delay any possible U.S. military action to disarm Iraq. Germany, France, and Russia, states we called "friendly" when I was in Baghdad, are also engaged in a strategy of delay and obstruction. In the two decades before the Gulf War, I played a role in Iraq's efforts to acquire major technologies from friendly states. In 1974, I headed an Iraqi delegation to France to purchase a nuclear reactor. It was a 40-megawatt research reactor that our sources in the IAEA told us should cost no more than $50 million. But the French deal ended up costing Baghdad more than $200 million. The French-controlled Habbania Resort project cost Baghdad a whopping $750 million, and with the same huge profit margin. With these kinds of deals coming their way, is it any surprise that the French are so desperate to save Saddam's regime? Germany was the hub of Iraq's military purchases in the 1980s. Our commercial attaché, Ali Abdul Mutalib, was allocated billions of dollars to spend each year on German military industry imports. These imports included many proscribed technologies with the German government looking the other way. In 1989, German engineer Karl Schaab sold us classified technology to build and operate the centrifuges we needed for our uranium-enrichment program. German authorities have since found Mr. Schaab guilty of selling nuclear secrets, but because the technology was considered "dual use" he was fined only $32,000 and given five years probation. Meanwhile, other German firms have provided Iraq with the technology it needs to make missile parts. Mr. Blix's recent finding that Iraq is trying to enlarge the diameter of its missiles to a size capable of delivering nuclear weapons would not be feasible without this technology transfer. Russia has long been a major supplier of conventional armaments to Iraq--yet again at exorbitant prices. Even the Kalashnikov rifles used by the Iraqi forces are sold to Iraq at several times the price of comparable guns sold by other suppliers. Saddam's policy of squandering Iraq's resources by paying outrageous prices to friendly states seems to be paying off. The irresponsibility and lack of morality these states are displaying in trying to keep the world's worst butcher in power is perhaps indicative of a new world order. It is a world of winks and nods to emerging rogue states--for a price. It remains for the U.S. and its allies to institute an opposing order in which no price is high enough for dictators like Saddam to thrive. Mr. Hamza, a former director of Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, is the co-author of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda" (Scribner, 2000).

To: unclewest who wrote (73074)	2/11/2003 3:57:52 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush has stirred up a hornets nest and HAS NOT secured our homeland... There is NO PROOF that by going to war we will be any more secure...In fact its becoming clearer that we will inspire a whole new wave of terror attacks against The United States and our interests around the world... Homeland security shell game By Thomas Oliphant Columnist The Boston Globe 2/11/2003 WASHINGTON - THERE IS a revealing disconnect in the latest national terrorism alert -- and an outrageous shell game in the Bush administration's approach to homeland security. What is being ignored is the impact on police, firefighters, emergency workers, and other security-related people who get the first calls when we see something odd or experience something terrible. Raising of the alert status to orange -- the second-highest color -- for the second time reflects a judgment that the disparate components of intelligence suggest a greater likelihood of attack. That judgment is far from unanimous; many officials think higher-ups are merely covering their tails. These officials think we should always be on high alert. Indeed, the one specific in Attorney General John Ashcroft's announcement Friday involved a warning about ''soft or lightly secured'' structures like apartment buildings, hotels, and malls. You couldn't ask for a more chilling reminder of the country's vulnerability. The announcement led to an obvious question: What are people supposed to do? And that in turn led to the ongoing contradiction in national guidance: Don't change your daily life, and for heaven's sake don't stop shopping, but be alert for people trying to kill you. The new secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, managed one suggestion: Each family should have an emergency plan for contacting relatives in the event of attack. What was missing was an awareness of the increased pressure on the state and local agencies the Bush administration is short-changing. For every extra federal border guard watching traffic from Canada over the weekend, there were at least a hundred local and state cops around the country doing extra hours at public facilities or pulled off other assignments. In the language of conservatives, it is the ultimate unfunded federal mandate. Last month Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did a survey of New York's cities and towns and discovered that an astonishing 70 percent had yet to receive one dime in security assistance since the 9/11 attacks. It gets worse. After examining budget documents, Clinton discovered the shell game -- in this case the diversion of money to pay for homeland security. Most of us who are condemned to read budget material know about the concept of robbing Peter (housing, for example) to pay Paul (Star Wars missile defense). President Bush would rob Peter to pay Peter. Next year the administration proposes to spend about $41 billion on homeland security. The $4 billion to $5 billion increase in the Bush budget, though, is largely illusory. For one thing, the numbers take advantage of the fact that there is still no appropriation for the current year that ends in September. Once this year's spending is set by statute, the actual increase will be roughly half that. Then the shell game takes over. What Clinton noticed is that roughly $2 billion has been cut from the budgets of federal programs that beef up ''first responders,'' those local workers who compose the front lines. The FBI will gets its money for strike forces and intelligence, Ridge's new department will get a new building, and he will get a new office and staff, but cops and firefighters will be neglected. The successful program her husband promoted in the '90s to help localities hire more officers would be all but eliminated. The national program that assists local fire departments would be cut in half. The administration trumpets a ''new'' proposal to combine federal law enforcement assistance money into one of those block grants conservatives love, hiding the fact that the proposed grant contains well over a half-billion dollars less than what's in the programs it would replace. In all, Clinton estimates the cost at some 4,000 cops not hired nationally, plus untold thousands of firefighters. Clinton proposes that all these federal cutbacks be rejected, a minimalist idea that at least avoids harm. But it also helps to remember that this shell game is being played while the worst fiscal crisis in 60 years is creating a hole that is certain to exceed $100 billion in state and local budgets, for which law enforcement will suffer its share of further cutbacks. And this limited discussion doesn't cover vital matters like poorly guarded ports, the unfunded mandate on state labs because of chemical and biological scares, and the impact on local law enforcement of reserve call-ups for war. It is as if the administration had announced a greater danger of attack and the president had announced that in response he was reducing our preparedness. There's a word for this -- nuts. © Copyright 2003 Boston Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com