Pressuring Hans Blix
Memo To: Wall Street Journal Editors
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: An Iraqi Atomic Bomb?
In your lead editorial last week, trashing Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, you charged that he was fooled by Saddam Hussein in the 1980's when he “pronounced Iraq nuclear free.” He never made any such pronouncement. What IAEA inspectors did, back then, was to merely verify that the materials and facilities that had been 'declared' by Iraq to be subject to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty safeguards and security regime had not been mis-used. The IAEA conducted similar inspections of those same Iraq 'declared' sites as recently as January of this year. Up until 1998, Blix headed the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Where you mislead in the editorial, perhaps deliberately, is when you charge that “documents seized after the Gulf War” show “Saddam was perhaps only months away from getting a bomb.”
The IAEA Action Team -- which is a different entity from the IAEA-NPT regime which inspects 'declared' sites for NPT compliance -- was established by UN Security Council Resolution 687, and was charged with overseeing the destruction of the Iraqi clandestine nuke program. The IAEA Action Team submitted dozens of reports to the UNSC in the period 1991 and 1999. The IAEA Action Team reported that the Iraqi clandestine nuke program was broad based and well funded and was 'on the threshold' of being successful. But being 'on the threshold' of success is not the same as being successful. 'Perhaps' in this context means 'maybe never'.
In any case, the IAEA Action Team Reported in December 1998 that the entire Iraqi clandestine nuke program -- including all 'dual use' activities subject to UNSCR 687, but not to the NPT -- had been destroyed. What the IAEA Action Team now has to discover is how much progress -- if any -- Iraq has made since then in reconstituting that program.
The fairy tale that the Iraqis are now 'perhaps' months -- at most a few years -- from making a nuke is largely based upon the testimony before Congress and elsewhere of Khidar Hamza, widely represented by the warhawks and media elite to have been in charge of the Iraqi nuke program before the Gulf War and significantly involved in it up until 1994 when he 'defected'.
If you had done a little checking, you would have found that Hamza had very little involvement in Saddam’s nuke program and much of his testimony about it is hearsay. Hamza inititally found 'employment' after his 'defection' as a consultant to David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. Albright was an expert-consultant to the International Atomic Energy Action team from 1992 to 1997 and in June of '96 he became the first non-IAEA inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program. Here is an interview Dr. Albright gave on September 25 as a consequence of testimony Hamza gave before Congress, in which he essentially dismisses Hamza as being a witting tool of Richard Perle and the warhawks.
The next time to write about a subject so critical as the existence or non-existence of a clandestine Iraqi nuke development program, please do your readers the service of checking the 'facts'. Don't use hearsay and/or fairy tales as a foundation for a lead editorial on such an important subject.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/s686055.htm
After you have disabused yourself of the notion -- perpetuated by Hamza and his warhawk 'handlers' -- that Iraq will soon have nukes, you ought to check out Dr. Albright's website, paying particular attention to his assessment of UNSCR 1441.
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/draftresolution.html
And to his assessment of the pre-Gulf War uranium-enrichment program.
http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/iraqs_fm_ history.html
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