There are only two kinds of people who believe anything other than what former President Clinton said: those who work for Saddam and ostriches. This is all a charade. Everybody knows he has chemical and bacteriological weapons. He refused to declare hundreds of tons of VX gas and sarin and thousands of liters of anthrax and botuleum. Once the U.N. inspectors discovered these because of (the former head of the weapons program) Hussain Kamal's defection in 1995, Saddam said, ''Oh, those biological weapons.'' How credulous does someone have to be to believe Saddam now?
We may not have evidence that can be shown until Iraq is liberated and the buried gas centrifuges and bottles of anthrax and canisters of VX are turned up.
The Guardian
By, David Albright
Weapons Inspector
Interview
August 11, 2002
Interview by Will Hodgkinson. David Albright is a former inspector of the Iraqi nuclear programme and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). www.isis-online.org.
There have been some press reports about Iraq having a gas-centrifuge enrichment programme to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. People have argued that you could find nuclear facilities quickly as they are big, but Iraq knows how to make them small. A reactor is hard to hide, but a uranium enrichment programme is entirely possible. The clock is ticking.
You would think that if Iraq had a nuclear weapon, it would have done something to show it. But then you can't be certain. Another factor that increases the uncertainty is that Iraq is well aware that Russian controls on nuclear material are terrible, and is excellent at illicit procurement. It works with insiders, it doesn't deal with middlemen, and it has a fighting chance of getting highly enriched uranium and not being discovered. Once it gets the gas-centrifuge programme, you have to assume that it could make [a bomb] in half a year.
A lot of time has been spent trying to find out what Iraqi scientists know. Some are idiots, some are very bright and some learn extremely quickly. The UN created incentives for Iraqi scientists to defect, but very few took it up. Anything we can do to get the scientists out is important as there aren't that many of them, and they're not that into making nuclear weapons because they understand better than anyone what will happen if Iraq really gets them.
A colleague of mine met an Iraqi scientist in Vienna a few years ago. We were stunned that he was travelling, but his family is in Baghdad and they will be killed if he doesn't go back.
The defectors who revealed a lot about the gas-centrifuge programme in 1991 were younger people who were drafted into it. Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, who was the head of the programme, would look at all the Iraqis returning from foreign education and snap them up, and some didn't like it. There was one in particular who packed up, put his family in a car and escaped. He told us a tremendous amount.