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Nobody appears to dispute what I wrote in last week's Slate to the effect that in February 1999, Saddam Hussein dispatched his former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and former delegate to non-proliferation conferences at the United Nations, to Niger. Wissam al-Zahawie was, at the time of his visit, the accredited ambassador of Iraq to the Vatican: a more senior post than it may sound, given that the Vatican was almost the only full European embassy that Iraq then possessed. And nobody has proposed an answer to my question: Given the fact that Niger is synonymous with uranium...

The Sixteen Words Were True By Christopher Hitchens Slate | April 11, 2006 In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at...

In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.) At a later 1995 U.N. special session...

In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.) At a later 1995 U.N. special session...

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...

Iraqi Agent Went To Niger In 1999 July 31, 2003 Terry Jeffrey, the editor of Human Events, reports a great story, "Saddam Sent Trade Mission to Niger." Jeffrey went through the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency records and found that they say Saddam Hussein sent an ambassador named Al Zahawie on a trade mission to Niger in 1999. As Jeffrey asks, "If Iraq’s emissary to Niger sought trade, the implication is obvious: Did Saddam want Niger uranium, or did he want Niger cows or cowpeas?" The Iraqi nuclear hawk did, indeed, go to Niger in 1999. It's backup that the...

October 1, 2003 What the War Revealed By David Quinn In the run-up to the recent Gulf War, I received a letter from a reader of the Irish Catholic, for which I was at that point still editor, declaring that if I kept up my support for the United States’s position with regard to Iraq, I would find myself automatically excommunicated from the Church. I had previously heard of Catholics who supported the war being described as dissidents, but to say that such people could consider themselves excommunicated was to take things to a new level entirely. My reader’s reasoning...

In their zeal to retroactively rebut the argument for the Iraq war, critics of President Bush have tried to discredit a British intelligence report -- cited by the president in his State of the Union address -- that concluded Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. The most important evidence against the British report is the undisputed conclusion by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries.What Bush's critics have ignored is that ElBaradei and the IAEA also presented evidence that tends to...