Time will tell.. looks like that was 3 hours and 36 minutes. Sorry I missed it earlier:
IAEA: Centrifuge parts not evidence of ‘smoking gun’](http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/26/sprj.irq.iaea/)
“The findings refer to material and documents of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear weapons program that have been well- known to the agency,” said spokesman Mark Gwozdecky.
Spoon, that was stated in the orginal story that this was from the old nuke program...is the agency saying they knew parts were buired in Iraq?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
Spoon, that was stated in the orginal story that this was from the old nuke program...is the agency saying they knew parts were buired in Iraq?
[/QUOTE]
Exactly so. This discovery may not be a "smoking gun" that Iraq had a current nuclear program ongoing (which is what the IAEA is saying).
However, it is surely a "smoking gun" that Iraq took steps to hide documents and equipment for reconstituting its nuke program later. Thus, these items were not destroyed. These items were not disclosed by Iraq in its weapons declarations. The IAEA consistently did say that Iraq failed to account for some stuff from its earlier nuke program. Well, here's part of it found buried (at the instruction of Saddam's son) in a scientist's rose garden.
Now Spoon: Maybe you could provide a harmless explanation for why Saddam's son would be asking nuke scientists to bury documents and equipment which would enable it to reconstitute its nuke programs.
I believe that the nuclear parts were buried under a rose garden to symbolically represent that one day Iraq would revive it's nuke program and use them against the rose garden located at the White House.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by myvoice: *
**Nadia: That was the whole point of trying to get Iraqi scientists and their families safely out of Iraq for interviews. Get them out and make them safe so they'd tell us where things were buried. Here are some revealing parts of the story.*
[/quote]
MyVoice, You do not believe that that casts some doubt upon the legitimacy of statements from greencard-grabbing former scientists?
According to PM Blair and his government, Iraq could deploy WMD within "45 minutes". We are still waiting for the proof. According to President Bush and his aides, Iraq posed an "imminent" threat to the rest of the world. We are still waiting for the proof for that claim as well.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Nadia_H: *According to President Bush and his aides, Iraq posed an "imminent" threat to the rest of the world. We are still waiting for the proof for that claim as well.
[/QUOTE]
This coming from a man that choked on a pretzel. If a pretzel could nearly kill him. Saddam definitely posed an "imminent" threat.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Nadia_H: *
**MyVoice*, You do not believe that that casts some doubt upon the legitimacy of statements from greencard-grabbing former scientists?
According to PM Blair and his government, Iraq could deploy WMD within "45 minutes". We are still waiting for the proof. According to President Bush and his aides, Iraq posed an "imminent" threat to the rest of the world. We are still waiting for the proof for that claim as well.
[/QUOTE]
Nadia:
Here are your choices on who to believe.
1. Iraqi scientists whose lives and families lives were in serious jeopardy while under the thumb of Saddam;
2. Iraqi scientists whose lives and those of their families are no longer under jeopardy by Saddam because of US guarantees of safety.
Both situations arguably give the scientist a reason to lie. So what do you do to judge the credibility? You weigh their statements against other known and provable facts. This scientist did not merely say he was ordered to bury papers and equipment relevant to Iraq's nuclear program. The papers and equipment have now been dug up. So now we know that he was not lieing about burying the material. To believe he is lieing about being ordered to do so, you would have to believe he burried the stuff on his own. Essentially stealing the materials from Saddam. Now, as an intelligent person, can you seriously believe that this scientist would do something like that which would most assuredly subject him and his family to death under the Saddam regime if that were discovered?
Whether Iraq could "deploy" WMD within 45 minutes is entirely irrelevant to whether Saddam hid WMD and/or equipment and documents regarding WMD programs.
As to imminent threat, yes I believe Bush was right when he said that. This discovery and others that will surely be made in other gardens provide proof of same. Even the UN inspector quoted in the article made it clear that inspectors would never have discovered the stuff in the scientists rose garden. And this piece of the article is pretty chilling: ** "Experts said the documents and pieces Obeidi gave the United States were the critical information and parts to restart a nuclear weapons program, and would have saved Saddam's regime several years and as much as hundreds of millions of dollars for research. " **
Unless you choose to believe this was a rogue scientist burrying stuff on his own, you have to conclude that similar events occured with respect to other scientists. With mobile biolabs in place and documents and other materials hidden, my own guess is that we will learn that the Saddam regime could have been in full production of WMD within a matter of days of UN inspectors certifying them as WMD free and leaving. Although it depends on your definition of what constitutes an "imminent" threat, I easily can accept this scenario as imminent enough to justify the US action.
I'm still of the belief that manufactured chemicals, biotoxins, gasses, etc. will be discovered in Iraq. They too might be burried in some guy's rose garden. It seems as if Saddam learned not to bury this stuff all in a single location when the UN discovered in 1994 the huge horde he burried beside the Euphrates River. He responded by dispersing the stuff in smaller increments in numerous harder to find places.
**
lolz. :hehe:
MyVoice, So now it is being demanded that time must be allotted in order to discover these “harder to find places”? How much more time? More than the three and a half months that Blix and his team were given?
The British government seems to be paying the price for its “special relationship” with the US - Alastair Campbell and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw are on the defensive:
Straw says dossier was ‘embarrassing’, BBC, 24 June 2003
Nadia:
You totally ignore the opinion and fact that the former UN inspectors themselves acknowledge that the mode of hiding and burial as evidenced in the Obeidi situation NEVER could have been uncovered by UN inspection teams under circumstances where Saddam remained in power. Amount of time is irrelevant. It just simply could not have been discovered.
It is only because Saddam is gone that people like Obeidi feel they can come forward and spill the proverbial beans.
He said: ** "other Iraqi scientists were watching to see if he was safe after he cooperated with the U.S. government.
Now that he and his family are safely out of Iraq, Obeidi said he believes other scientists would come forward with other components of Iraq's weapons program." **
I don't know how long before they come forward. Hopefully, it will happen soon. If we ever find and capture or kill Saddam, my guess is that the comfort level in coming forward will rise dramatically. The point is though that they NEVER would come forward under the UN inspections regime. I don't know how you can even dispute that fact.
You guys are still quibbling over why we spanked Saddam? Who cares?
THe civil war in the US wasn't sold as a war against slavery. Abolition was an added bonus. I don't care why we took out that evil person adn his regime. WMD, Tyranny, repression, oil, whatever....the world is a better place.
Yeah Matsui, it is like when you sow a plant, you don’t know how many tomatoes you will get.
**10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq **
check it out here.
watch 'correspondent' on bbc world .....
they will tell you about WMD ...
all this weekend!
It still amuses me that we were able to prosecute a war, but not this guy.
This dude wrote an op-ed piece today in the NY Times - his biography in his own words, “In 1990, as chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush’s ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.”
Register at the NY Times website in order to gain access to the article.
What I Didn’t Find in Africa, Joseph C. Wilson
Retired diplomat: Iraq intelligence twisted by administration
Jennifer Kerr, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 July 2003
Bush’s false claims?
It is not going to effect much on Bush, as the administration is blaming the intellegence coming out of British for the bo bo, but I am sure the MPs are going to grill Blair.
Interesting quote in bold!!!
Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says
By DAVID E. SANGER
ASHINGTON, July 7 — The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.
The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was “reconstituting” his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.
The acknowledgment came after a day of questions — and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials — about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.
“There is other reporting to suggest that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Africa,” the statement said. “However, the information is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that attempts were in fact made.”
In other words, said one senior official, “we couldn’t prove it, and it might in fact be wrong.”
Separately tonight, The Washington Post quoted an unidentifed senior administration official as declaring that “knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech.” Some administration officials have expressed similar sentiments in interviews in the past two weeks.
Asked about the statement early today, before President Bush departed for a six-day tour of Africa, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said, “There is zero, nada, nothing new here.” He said that “we’ve long acknowledged” that information on the attempted purchases from Niger “did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.”
But in public, administration officials have defended the president’s statement in the State of Union address that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
While Mr. Bush cited the British report, seemingly giving the account the credibility of coming from a non-American intelligence service, Britain itself relied in part on information provided by the C.I.A., American and British officials have said.
But today a report from a parliamentary committee that conducted an investigation into the British assertions also questioned the credibility of what the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair had published.
The committee went on to say that Mr. Blair’s government had asserted it had other evidence of Iraqi attempts to procure uranium. But eight months later the government still had not told Parliament what that other information was.
While Mr. Bush quoted the British report, his statement was apparently primarily based on American intelligence — a classified “National Intelligence Estimate” published in October of last year that also identified two other countries, Congo and Somalia, where Iraq had sought the material, in addition to Niger.
But many analysts did not believe those reports at the time, and were shocked to hear the president make such a flat, declarative statement.
Asked about the accuracy of the president’s statement this morning, Mr. Fleischer said, “We see nothing that would dissuade us from the president’s broader statement.” But when pressed, he said he would clarify the issue later today.
Tonight, after Air Force One had departed, White House officials issued a statement in Mr. Fleischer’s name that made clear that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush’s statement.
How Mr. Bush’s statement made it into last January’s State of the Union address is still unclear. No one involved in drafting the speech will say who put the phrase in, or whether it was drawn from the classified intelligence estimate.
That document contained a footnote — in a separate section of the report, on another subject — noting that State Department experts were doubtful of the claims that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium.
If the intelligence was true, it would have buttressed statements by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking a nuclear weapon, and could build one in a year or less if he obtained enough nuclear material.
In early March, before the invasion of Iraq began, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the uranium reports about Niger, noting that they were based on forged documents.
In an interview late last month, a senior administration official said that the news of the fraud was not brought to the attention of the White House until after Mr. Bush had spoken.
But even then, White House officials made no effort to correct the president’s remarks. Indeed, as recently as a few weeks ago they were arguing that Mr. Bush had quite deliberately avoided mentioning Niger, and noted that he had spoken more generally about efforts to obtain “yellowcake,” the substance from which uranium is extracted, from African nations.
Tonight’s statement, though, calls even those reports into question. In interviews in recent days, a number of administration officials have conceded that Mr. Bush never should have made the claims, given the weakness of the case. One senior official said that the uranium purchases were “only one small part” of a broader effort to reconstitute the nuclear program, and that Mr. Bush probably should have dwelled on others.
White House officials would not say, however, how the statement was approved. They have suggested that the Central Intelligence Agency approved the wording, though the C.I.A. has said none of its senior leaders had reviewed it. Other key members of the administration said the information was discounted early on, and that by the time the president delivered the State of the Union address, there were widespread questions about the quality of the intelligence.
“We only found that out later,” said one official involved in the speech.
p.s: If a thread is already open on this, please merge!
Bush, Blair and others made such claims to garnish public support for the war. The PR stunt worked well (at least in US). Now Iraq has been liberated, does it matter what CIA or MI6 or James Bond had to say about threats that Iraq posed? This sorta topic has been beaten to death here on WA in a few dozen threads.
So the White House admits that Bush had erred in his State of the Union speech when he said Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Africa Now onder the Democrats are calling for an investigation into this:-
Democrats Urge Probe of Iraqi Uranium Claim](Yahoo News: Latest and Breaking News, Headlines, Live Updates, and More)
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/office3.jpg
just some funny pic relating to the thread ..dont tell me its better off to image gallery or some other place