Posted on 08/01/2003 12:57:34 PM PDT by Jean S
Wissam al Zahawie, the Iraqi official whom the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says went on a "trade mission" to uranium-exporting Niger in 1999, had a record of promoting resentment against America and Israel and of making Iraq's case for building a nuclear bomb.
Zahawie's record raises questions about the thoroughness of the IAEA investigation of his trip to Niger and its candor in reporting the findings of that investigation.
At a 1995 UN conference on extending the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Zahawie (sometimes spelled "Zahawi") argued that unless Israel was stripped of nuclear weapons, other states would need to engage in "a secret or public" arms race to "restore a certain balance."
In an official UN summary of the April 24, 1995, session of this conference—provided to me by the United Nations Library—Zahawie sometimes referred to Israel as the "entity." "In that entity," the summary cites him as saying, "there was a powerful opposition party which was expected to win the forthcoming elections and which was urging that not a single inch of the occupied territories should be surrendered, and was ready, in its fanaticism, to go to any lengths, whatever the cost. It was not hard to see what that party would do with its nuclear bomb."
'Secret or Public'
"[B]y exempting one State [Israel] from applying the provisions of the Treaty while expecting others to respect it forever," the UN summary cites Zahawie as saying, "there would inevitably be attempts to restore a certain balance. That meant an arms race, whether secret or public."
"Efforts must therefore be made either to establish equity and equilibrium," the UN summary reports Zahawie as saying, "or—preferably—to attain the ultimate goal sought by all mankind, namely the complete and permanent elimination of the nuclear threat."
Citing what he characterized as belligerent statements by various U.S. leaders of the Cold War era, Zahawie argued that the U.S. refrained from using nuclear weapons only out of fear of Soviet retaliation. "Apparently, the military and civilian leaders of the United States were very attached to the idea of atomic bombing designed to destroy a city or an entire country, since their experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," the UN summary reports him saying.
"If there had been any equilibrium at the beginning," it cites him as saying, "the world would not have experienced the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Zahawie's belligerence did not go unnoticed at the time. "Iraq's delegate at the conference, Wissam Al-Zahawi," reported Agence France Presse, "warned that if the international community allowed Israel to remain outside the NPT it would lead to 'inevitable attempts' to reestablish 'some kind of equilibrium' in the region, followed by a 'secret or open' arms race."
In a letter published on Nov. 12, 1997, in the International Herald Tribune, Zahawie, identified as Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican, was more direct. "Iraq has shown that there are Arabs who refuse to bow to American bullying," he wrote. "It has challenged a Zionist-American diktat by trying to achieve the forbidden strategic balance that would enable Arabs to resist Israeli aggression."
In a letter published in the International Herald Tribune on Feb. 10, 1998, he objected to columns by William Safire and Thomas Friedman that advocated the use of force to disarm Saddam. "The present rabid braying and warmongering will surely serve to stiffen Iraqis' resolve, to increase their hatred of their American tormentors and to rally people around their president," he wrote.
On December 30, 1999, 10 months after his trade mission to Niger, the International Herald Tribune published a letter from Zahawie objecting to resumption of UN weapons inspections. "It should come as no surprise that Iraq should resist the return of the so-called inspectors who were relaying to the United States and Britain the information they need to choose the targets for their systematic bombing of Iraq," Zahawie wrote.
But Zahawie won attention in the United Nations, and the IAEA, long before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait sparked conflict between Iraq and the United States. On November 12, 1981, in a surprise maneuver, Iraq won a vote in the General Assembly inserting an amendment condemning Israel's destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor into a routine declaration on the IAEA. The Associated Press quoted Zahawie as saying, "The Zionist act of aggression is also an attack against the IAEA."
In 1984, he tried to block Israeli President Chaim Herzog from speaking to the General Assembly. "Wissam Zahawie of Iraq objected on the ground that, according to United Nations resolutions, Israel's claim that Jerusalem was its capital was 'null and void,'" reported The New York Times.
In the March 7 report to the Security Council in which he revealed that documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries, IAEA General Director Mohamed ElBaradei also mentioned that an Iraqi official had visited Niger in 1999. But he did not name Zahawie as that official and did not state that Zahawie was on a trade mission.
Given Zahawie's record, why did ElBaradei make these omissions?
In this column last week, I reported that IAEA Senior Information Officer Melissa Fleming, in response to written questions from me, did state that Zahawie was the Iraqi official who went to Niger in 1999. He went, she said, as "a part of a trade mission and also he was accredited to Niger as Ambassador." IAEA, she said, had interviewed him in Baghdad in the presence of Iraqi monitors.
'Confidential Information'
This week, I sent follow up questions to IAEA. Among them: What did Zahawie say Iraq hoped to import from Niger? What other African countries did he visit? Did any Iraqis go with Zahawie, and did IAEA interview them? Was Zahawie, or any companion, ever involved in procuring any material relevant to Iraq's nuclear weapons program?
I also asked if the IAEA had investigated a second possible contact between Iraq and Niger in 1999. (According to a July 11 statement by CIA Director George Tenet, an outside investigator whom the CIA sent to Niger last year—who former Amb. Joseph C. Wilson has identified as himself in a New York Times op-ed—reported that a former Niger official he spoke with "said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales." This alleged June overture, trying to set up a subsequent Iraq-Niger "commercial relations" meeting, would have taken place four months after what the IAEA described as Zahawi's February 1999 "trade mission.")
Ms. Fleming responded by e-mail: "I have discussed your questions with colleagues here and am afraid we will not be in a position to provide answers to them," she wrote. "This information was never in our reports to the Security Council and has not been made public. You are requesting confidential information from our investigations and interviews that we, as a general policy, do not provide unless it is felt the information is necessary to reveal to the Security Council or to IAEA member States."
On July 27, the London Sunday Times reported that Zahawie has written a letter to friends explaining his trip to Niger. "In February 1999, I was instructed to visit four west African countries to extend an invitation on behalf of the Iraqi president to their heads of state to visit Baghdad," the Times quotes the letter as saying. "I had no other instructions and certainly none concerning the purchase of uranium."
The paper did not name who received the letter, or the place from which it was sent.
I posted my tin-foil opinion that France had some knowledge, if not active participation, in the WTC attack prior to 9/11, which explained Chirac's hysteria to keep us out of Iraq.
And now we see this! Very interesting,Shermy! Thanks!
You make enriched uranium from plain old uranium. Remember the scientist who had a gas centrifuge buried under his rosebush in Iraq? You take uranium ore and make Uranium Floride with it. You then use the slight weight difference between U235 (bomb material) and U238 (not bomb material) and run the gas thousands of times through the centrifuge, until you're left with gas that is mostly U235.
I laugh every time someone posts something like that. :-D
***Sigh***...remember the centrifuge we dug up in the rose garden? Take into consideration this article from 1990...
By the time the world ceased commerce with Iraq in retaliation for the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein's scientists had apparently already imported enough technical know-how, exotic material and specialized equipment for an independent nuclear-weapon effort. Still more disturbing are reports reaching US agencies that Iraqi scientists can now make the complex gas centrifuges that are crucial for raising natural uranium to nuclear-weapon grade, substantially freeing Iraqi nuclear-material production from outside sources.Intelligence reports indicate that Saddam's scientists have the technology and expertise to chemically convert the uranium to a gas and will soon begin building the centrifuges needed to enrich the gas to nuclear-weapon grade. By spinning uranium gas at high speed, the centrifuge separates the heavier isotope of uranium, which is inert, from the lighter isotope, which is unstable and produces the chain reaction needed for a bomb. If those steps are achieved, it is within Iraq's grasp to turn the enriched gas back into the metal needed for the core of a bomb. Sources familiar with the reports say that Iraq already has a handful of centrifuges operating and the blueprints for producing more.
Then add this:
Several Iraqi nuclear weapons facilities and much equipment were indeed dismantled or destroyed by U.N. inspectors between 1991 and 1998. However, substantial and significant issues about Iraq’s ability to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program remained unresolved when the inspectors left the country.So...yes the statement IS important and enriched uranium within a month was a possibility.Dolley, citing IAEA’s own inspection reports as documentation, said: “Iraq has never surrendered to inspectors its two completed designs for a nuclear bomb, nuclear-bomb components such as explosive lenses and neutron initiators that it is known to have possessed, or almost any documentation of its efforts to enrich uranium to bomb-grade using gas centrifuges, devices which are small and readily concealed from reconnaissance.”[5]
Moreover, IAEA has previously conceded that Iraq’s weaponization R&D---small-scale technical research devoted to the design of a nuclear bomb’s components---is not readily detected by means of inspections. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei stated in 1998 that “no matter how comprehensive the inspection, any country-wide verification process, in Iraq or anywhere else, has a degree of uncertainty that aims to verify the absence of readily concealable objects such as small amounts of nuclear material or weapons components.”[6]
The IAEA’s own guidelines for the safeguarding of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium gives the conversion time for transforming these materials into weapons components as on the order of seven to ten days or one to three weeks, depending on the form the materials are in (metal, oxide or nitrate) when the materials are acquired by means of diversion or theft.[7] Thus, Iraq could be capable of producing a nuclear weapon in less than a month with sufficient diverted or stolen fissile material if it has managed to fabricate and conceal all of the non-nuclear components of a weapon.
Indeed he was, as time will slowly, and for the RATs, torturously reveal.
Not once did Pissy Mathews or Joe Wilson speak about the other sources of Intel on Niger or Africa. They kept talking about the forged document even though the White had never seen or known about the forged document until after the SOTU Speach.
For the life of me I can't figure out why President Bush hasn't dispatched Colin Powell and a few others to refute this Niger issue. There has to be something else going on behind the scenes that is preventing them from puting these lies to rest. My only guess is that we have somebody in custody that is working with us as David Kay puts the whole hidden WMD programs together for the world to see just how dangerous Saddam actually was.
The fact that the 9/11 report has 28 pages of blank pages tells me that they were put there for a reason. Why not just leave those pages out?, my guess is they were put in there to shake people up and get them talking. The Saudi's sure got shaken up over them.
If there is a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, and a connection between the Saudi's and Al-Qaeda, there could be a Saudi Saddam connection that we are investigating
If I wanted to catch some spies and leakers in Congress, I believe I would put out different inconsequential or fake names to different suspected parties and see whih names surfaced in the press, and in which outlet.
I also would hold my fire while the busy little spies were thinking they got away with something.
I do believe Powell addressed this issue in an interview, but of course the media would ignore anything that doesn't support their "Bush lied" mantra.
Well, I am calling it a night. I will check on these threads tomorrow.
I thought this week they are saying Condi Rice lied
Hmmm .. or was that last week ?
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