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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (159400)	2/28/2006 4:41:30 PM
From: kech	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794015

Just as significant is that there was not a single reference in her set speech about Saddam trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Before the war, Rice said, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The scary vision of mushroom clouds was repeated by Bush and General Tommy Franks, head of Central Command. Vice President Dick Cheney declared Saddam to be a "mortal threat" on his way to "nuclear blackmail." In a question-and-answer session after her speech, Rice continued to assert that she was "certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon." This is brazen, as Rice has yet to produce even a smoking gun. The only way the existing nuclear program was discovered in the mid-90's was because Saddam's nuclear program was revealed by his son-in-law Kemal Hussein, who was promptly shot when he returned to Iraq. No IAEA inspector discovered it. Hardly an endorsement of the process under way. In addition, in the recent Saddam tapes there was a post 2000 section on nooclear weapons. No one seems to have known much about this program before. cnsnews.com The most recent excerpts were dated to "post-2000" and featured scientists briefing Saddam on plasma technology activity within various venues. Some of the excerpts provided to the press, including references to "tokomaks" (a chamber used in fusion research to heat plasma) and "breakeven" (a condition under which heated plasma results in a net yield of energy) seemed to indicate the scientists were briefing Saddam on the basics of nuclear fusion I don't think the immediate threat was nooclear, mostly people talked about imminent threat from bio and chemical with longer term threat from nooclear. But the above suggests that even nooclear should not be dismissed so quickly. Most say it is pointless to try to identify where the weapons went since it is labeled, as you have done, "pursuit of big-foot to Syria". I guess I am beginning to agree with you that pointing out the shades of interpretation of where and when the weapons disappeared is easily dismissed. But the point is that it doesn't matter anyway, since the burden of proof was on the Iraqi's in Resolution 1441 which was the outcome of the Gulf War to show that they had destroyed all the WMD they were KNOWN to have. Since they didn't even begin to meet this threshold, it is not necessary to prove where and what and when they did something with them.