Nuclear Weapons: Saddam and the Scam Artists

A 'nuclear program' in Iraq? A soldier searches a mobile laboratory in 2003
By Mark Hosenball
NewsweekMay 17 issue - Vice President Dick Cheney once famously declared, shortly before the outbreak of war, that Saddam Hussein had, "in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." When no such weapons turned up, administration officials said that what Cheney really meant to say was that Iraq had "started reconstituting its nuclear program," which is what the CIA, in a secret (but later declassified) October 2002 intelligence analysis sent to the White House and Congress, said that "most" U.S. intel agencies believed.


But judging from some of the evidence turned up by U.S. search teams in Iraq after the war, even the CIA's more cautious prewar assessment may have been overheated. According to an intelligence source, one of the more significant files relating to Iraqi nuclear ambitions found in the archives of the Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service, included documents that reported an approach Iraq received in 2000 from a middleman based in Nairobi, Kenya. The file said that the middleman could supply Iraq with quantities of diamonds, cobalt and uranium, all produced in the mineral-rich Congo. But the file also included a note, apparently made by a Mukhabarat officer, indicating that Iraq did not take up the middleman's deal. The note indicated that the offer should not be pursued because Iraq's alleged WMD programs were under too much international scrutiny at the time. It added that Iraqi intelligence should "maintain contact" with the middleman in case it became easier for Baghdad to buy sensitive commodities in the future.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4934329/

Despite continuing questions and expert disagreement, Newsweek refers to "mobile laboratories."

Well, we really wouldn't want to do anything that suggested the Administration lied habitually, would we?

suspected mobile weapons lab, no breathing equipment, no bio-hazard exposure suit, no radiation exposure indicator.

Yeah sure, more horse shit.

180

TUWAITHA. Where is that bookmark? Every time I try to post one my text disappears. Durned new-fangled techno doo-daa... :mad: STEPHANIE!!!

i laughed. Not a ha-ha laugh, but a deep, dank, nassy curmudgeon chortle...

saying that if we were really concerned about WMD we ought to be taking steps to secure the country better. Since I got no meaningful response, I figured they already KNEW it was BS ...

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