Posted on 05/24/2003 4:31:22 PM PDT by Pokey78
British military officers have uncovered an attempt by Saddam Hussein to build a missile capable of hitting targets throughout the Middle East, including Israel, The Telegraph can reveal.
Plans for the surface-to-surface missile were one of the regime's most closely-guarded secrets and were unknown to United Nations weapons inspectors. Its range of 600 miles would have been far greater than that of the al-Samoud rocket - which already breached the 93-mile limit imposed by the UN on any Iraqi missiles.
Saddam's masterplan for the new missile, which was being developed by Iraq's Military Industrialisation Commission (MIC), the body responsible for weapons procurement, constitutes the most serious breach uncovered so far of the tight restrictions imposed on Iraq's military capability after the 1991 Gulf war. The range of Saddam's missiles was restricted to prevent him from using them as a delivery system for weapons of mass destruction.
David Kay, the former United Nations weapons inspector responsible for dismantling Iraq's nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s, said the British discovery proved that Saddam had no intention of complying with UN requirements.
"This is the smoking gun we have been looking for," he said. "We have known all along that Saddam was desperate to develop a delivery system for his mass destruction weapons, and this missile would undoubtedly have given him that capability."
Details of Saddam's secret missile programme were discovered by British weapons experts after interviews with several former senior officials of the MIC.
Gen Mudh'her Sadeq Sabe'a, the head of missile technology at the MIC, was in charge of the development programme, which began in 1999. Once a week Gen Mudh'her and Abdul Tawib Mulla Hawish, the minister responsible for the MIC, would travel to the presidential palace in Baghdad to deliver a progress report to Saddam, who is said to have taken a keen personal interest in the project.
Mr Hawish surrendered to coalition forces shortly after the war and has provided British officials with a detailed breakdown of Saddam's plans to manufacture the weapon.
The rocket motor was to be built at the Abu Ghraib military base, the main fuselage at al-Waziriyah and the navigation system at al-Taji. "We had finished the research stage and entered the development stage," said a senior Iraqi engineer who worked at the MIC and is now co-operating with British officials. "If it had not been for the war, development would have been completed within a year."
Iraqi officials insist that the missile was intended to carry a conventional warhead, but British weapons experts believe it could easily have been adapted to carry chemical or biological weapons.
The Iraqis say that the missile's main purpose would have been to protect Iraq from attack by neighbouring countries. However, it could also have been used to attack Israel. During the Gulf war Saddam launched Soviet-made Scud missiles at targets in Israel.
The discovery of the plans for Saddam's secret missile programme is being hailed as a significant breakthrough by coalition commanders, who have so far failed to find any convincing evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programme.
Now granted, our official cause for war was not just that they broke the agreement, but that they broke it and we specified developed WMD.
If you remember Powells presentation to the UN, he talked about the tubes that were being used and the illegal lenght or range of Iraq in developing missles. The Scuds they have could hit and had hit Israel during gulf war one, and was one of the things they needed to get rid of. This they obviousley did not do, since they fired them at Kuwait on at least one occasion during this war, some idiot liberals used the argument that as long as it couldn't go past a certain range, then the scud is legal, however, then it wouldn't be a scud, it would be something else.
8. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of: (a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities; (b) All ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities; 9. Decides, for the implementation of paragraph 8 above, the following: (a) Iraq shall submit to the Secretary-General, within fifteen days of the adoption of the present resolution, a declaration of the locations, amounts and types of all items specified in paragraph 8 and agree to urgent, on-site inspection as specified below; 10. Decides that Iraq shall unconditionally undertake not to use, develop, construct or acquire any of the items specified in paragraphs 8 and 9 above and requests the Secretary-General, in consultation with the Special Commission, to develop a plan for the future ongoing monitoring and verification of Iraq's compliance with this paragraph, to be submitted to the Security Council for approval within one hundred and twenty days of the passage of this resolution; |
I am bothered by the fact that we haven't found any WMD even though we've found evidence of the programs to produce them. It would be nice to find a few. We haven't even found any SCUDs, and nobody is talking about that.
I think eventually we will learn that Iraq shipped everything somewhere before the UN inspectors came back late last year. Total cleanout. They knew Bush was serious, and they weren't going to take the slightest chance of detection.
The question is where the stuff is.
Uday'll know.
But it's still not a WMD. And until we find better proof of that than we have so far, the critics will still be making noise.
"Details of Saddam's secret missile programme were discovered by British weapons experts after interviews with several former senior officials of the MIC.
The editor popped into the headline the words "Smoking Gun" for effect. It is not the "Smoking Gun" everyone is looking for ......yet.
We knew about the missle program, Powell talked at lenght about it in the televised speech that was at the U.N., we just never really focued on it, or made it a grounds for attack.
I agree there was plenty of reasons to go in, but first off, this war just barely ended, we haven't really gone at length in looking, and knowing where to look, its going to take some time. That said, what we always seem to find are the ingrediants to make the weapons, but not the weapons themselves, its kind of like having everything for a cake, but not the cake. There is no doubt in my mind that they have WMP, what was finished has probably been either buried, is in underground bunkers, or homes.
As for the SCUDS, they launched a SCUD into Kuwait during the war, if you remember, there were causalties, it hit a shopping Mall. The information minister denied it was fired from iraq and didn't know how it got into the mall (not joking, I'm serious).
Would you really expect them to cease whatever the outcome?
I think they identified that missle as the Iraqi variant of the Chinese silkworm.
Nope.
Initial reports called it a SCUD, but it turned out to be a Silkworm anti-ship missile. No SCUDS were fired or have been found so far.
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