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Nigergate: The shadow of the French inspector After yesterday’s posting, a close look at Ambassador Wilson, today’s the turn of Mr Jacques Baute. The following article raises some incredible questions and reveals some amazing facts. Mr Baute, a Frenchman, seemed to know all about the the Niger forgeries and kept very quiet about them. The result: the Bush administration was ridiculed. The day after Baute’s organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared the documents to be forgeries the French Government made a startling announcement..... The Bush administration was decieved by it’s presumed allies and the blame was placed on the...

OSLO, Norway -- A scientist considered the father of Iraq's nuclear program said Thursday that his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait. The invasion sparked the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad's nuclear and biological weapons program, said Jafar Dhia Jafar, the scientific head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear program," said Jafar, presenting his new Norwegian-language book, "Oppdraget", which...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

<p>A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.</p> <p>Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.</p>

Weapons Inspectors to Meet Iraqis U.N. Weapons Inspectors to Lay Down Demands to Iraq About Regaining Access to Restricted Sites UNITED NATIONS Sept. 29 — U.N. weapons inspectors, who on Monday will lay down demands to Iraq about getting back into the country, may not get the unfettered access demanded by the United States unless the Security Council alters a deal made in 1998. The inspectors are dusting off old equipment, ordering helicopters and testing new technology as the United States negotiates a new proposal for their return.The Bush administration dismissed Iraq's offer earlier this month to accept the inspectors'...