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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim-thompson who wrote (419262)	6/27/2003 8:05:17 AM
From: Land Shark	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

hey TPT jimbob joe billy bob jack check this one out: UN agency says nuclear find indicates Baghdad did not restart weapons program Canadian Press Thursday, June 26, 2003 ADVERTISEMENT VIENNA (AP) - Indirectly challenging a U.S. argument for war on Iraq, the UN atomic agency said Thursday that a find of parts from Baghdad's original nuclear weapons program appears to back its stance that the project had never been reactivated. The comments reflected the ongoing dispute between the United Nations and Washington over whether outsted president Saddam Hussein was trying to make weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. administration argued such programs existed in going to war against Baghdad, while UN inspectors said their searches on the ground turned up no evidence of such programs. A U.S. intelligence official said Wednesday that American authorities were examining parts and documents from an Iraqi weapons program run in the early 1990s that were handed over by a former Iraqi nuclear scientist. The scientist, Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, was quoted as saying he had kept the parts buried in his Baghdad garden on the orders of Saddam Hussein's government. Once sanctions against Iraq ended, the material was to be dug up and used to reconstitute a program to enrich uranium to make a nuclear weapon, Obeidi claimed to U.S. officials. The intelligence official acknowledged the find was not the "smoking gun" that U.S. authorities are seeking to prove U.S. claims that Iraq had an active program to develop a nuclear weapon. In Vienna Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency went even further, suggesting the revelations tended to back its arguments that there was no evidence of such revived programs. "The findings and comments of Obeidi appear to confirm that there has been no post-1991 nuclear weapons program in Iraq and are consistent with our reports to the Security Council," said agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky. The IAEA has long monitored Iraq's nuclear programs and has questioned U.S. claims that Saddam had been reviving his nuclear weapons program. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, said early on there was no evidence to support Washington's claims. Other UN inspectors found no signs of biological or chemical weapons. Since the war, U.S. teams looking for evidence of Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs have been chasing leads and tips from Iraqis who stand to win reward money offered for evidence. So far no weapons have been found. Before the second Gulf War, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies said they had evidence that Iraq was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, although some of that evidence has since been debunked. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Obeidi headed Iraq's program to make centrifuges that would enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, the official said. Most or all of that program was dismantled after UN inspections in the early 1990s. Details of Obeidi's activities during the past decade were not immediately available, although he was interviewed often by IAEA inspectors in 2002, the U.S. intelligence official said. Obeidi turned over a stack of documents that includes detailed designs for centrifuges, intelligence officials said. He told intelligence officials the parts from his garden were among the more difficult-to-produce components of a centrifuge. Assembled, the components would not be useful in making much uranium. Hundreds of centrifuges are necessary to make enough to construct a nuclear weapon in such programs. In Vienna, Gwozdecky, the agency spokesman, said the IAEA had "regularly" reported that Iraq had "successfully tested a single centrifuge prior to 1991." - On the Net: IAEA: www.iaea.org/worldatom