Home > Who Was Right About Iraqi WMDs? Why? What Now?

Who Was Right About Iraqi WMDs? Why? What Now?

by Open-Publishing - Friday 1 April 2005
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Nuclear Wars and conflicts International

WASHINGTON — March 31 — IMAD KHADDURI,
http://www.iraqsnuclearmirage.com/index_en.php
Khadduri worked on the Iraq nuclear weapons program beginning in 1981.

In November 2002, Khadduri wrote the article "Iraq’s Nuclear
Non-Capability" in which he commented: "Bush and Blair are pulling
their public by the nose" with "their hollow patriotic egging on." He
is author of the book "Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions."
He said today: "I did work on the Iraqi nuclear weapons program before
it ended during the first Gulf War in 1991. From 1991 to 1998 I
participated in work related to the inspection teams, we submitted our
final report, which was a complete history of the Iraqi nuclear
program, in 1998 to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was only
then I could leave Iraq. The Iraqi nuclear weapons program began right
after Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor in 1981. I worked on the program
because my country had a right to defend itself — from Israel and, as
we have seen, from the U.S., or possibly Iran. Look at North Korea,
their nuclear capacity is likely what is protecting them from an attack
by the U.S."

MORDECHAI VANUNU, http://accuracy.org/newsrelease...
Vanunu, who worked at Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility, revealed
Israel’s nuclear capacity in 1986. He said today: "Now we hope that
Bush can see his mistake and see the real nuclear state in the Mideast
— Israel. That is where the nuclear weapons are in the Mideast. I was
imprisoned for 18 years for trying to show this truth to the world.
Israel is still trying to silence me, and trying to prevent me from
going to the U.S. They do not want this truth to be widely known."
Vanunu is available for media interviews. He has been indicted by the
Israeli government for speaking to media. His court date is April 6.

JAMES JENNINGS, http://www.conscienceinternational.org
President of Conscience International, based near Atlanta, Jennings
made numerous humanitarian trips to Iraq between 1991 and 2003. In a
Conscience International news release on August 16, 2002, he stated:
"Proponents of the war must prove three things: that Iraq has WMD; that
Iraq has weaponized these systems; and that Iraq has the capability to
deliver them. None of these things are true. Iraq has no nuclear
weapons, having been certified as nuclear free by the IAEA and
international agencies. UNSCOM claims to have destroyed Iraq’s chemical
weapons capacity by 1994. Scott Ritter, the former UNSCOM chief weapons
inspector, stoutly denies that Iraq is a military threat, saying that
Iraq has been ’qualitatively disarmed.’ Even the Pentagon does not
seriously allege that Iraq possesses a significant missile capability.
Yet the war hawks keep urging Mr. Bush to attack Iraq with hugely
destructive armaments, including 5,000 lb. bombs, which, when dropped
on mud villages, as in Afghanistan, can certainly be described as true
weapons of mass destruction." Jennings was featured on an IPA news
release, "Bush’s War Case: Fiction vs. Facts at Accuracy.org/bush," on
October 9, 2002 <http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=598>.

JOHN R. MACARTHUR, http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1028-09.htm

On October 28, 2002, MacArthur wrote the article "Sounds Fishy, Mr.
President: To Drum Up Rage Against Iraq, Bush Senior and Junior Have
Been Known to Tell Tall Tales." He is author of the book "Second Front:
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War." In December 2002, MacArthur
was quoted on an IPA news release: "Recently, Bush cited an IAEA
[International Atomic Energy Agency] report that Iraq was ’six months
away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more
evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new
report, ’there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six
months away from constructing a nuclear weapon...." MacArthur said
today: "From the beginning of the ’marketing campaign’ for invasion in
the fall of 2002, we knew that the administration was fabricating
evidence for war." [see: <http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=581>]

RAHUL MAHAJAN, http://www.empirenotes.org
Currently in New York City, Mahajan is author of the book "Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond." He said today: "The
WMD commission has done the job it was created for: shifting blame from
the Bush administration’s drive to war regardless of the facts to
supposed
’faulty intelligence’ gathered by agencies like the CIA,
an organization the Bush administration wants to dismantle and remake
in its own image.

"It
didn’t take in-depth investigation to see the pattern of deception by
the administration on Iraq’s WMD. We had Colin Powell showing an
artist’s rendition of what an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle might look
like; Bush’s insistence that said UAV’s, with a claimed range of
several hundred miles, were to be used to ’target’ the United States;
Dick Cheney’s frequent claims about Iraq’s nuclear programs in the face
of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary; and, underlying it all,
the constant insinuation that the U.S. government had access to deep
sources of information unavailable to anyone else, when the Duelfer
report clearly showed that U.N. weapons inspectors were almost the only
source of information the United States had.

"The
commission blamed intelligence agencies for ’attention-grabbing
headlines’ that putatively pushed the administration to war; the same
administration was not even moved to end vacations of top officials by
the [memo] headline, ’Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United
States.’

"The
commission’s finding that intelligence operatives experienced no undue
political pressure to distort their findings is completely inconsistent
with numerous earlier reports, like claims made by ex-CIA
counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro as early as the fall of 2002
that ’cooked’ information was finding its way to the top. The
recommendations
the commission has made will unfortunately do little good unless the
underlying reasons behind the administration’s drive to war are
addressed." Mahajan was featured on an IPA news release just before the
invasion of Iraq, "White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit," March 18,
2003 <http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=536>.

JOHN STAUBER, http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=465, http://www.prwatch.org/books/wmd.html

Co-author of the book "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of
Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq" (July 2003), Stauber said today:
"It’s a ruse to blame the CIA for the disaster in Iraq. The Bush
administration deceived and lied the nation into attacking Iraq,
cynically exploiting the terrorism of 9/11 to launch a war long on the
agenda of neocons including Cheney and Wolfowitz. Bush’s pro-war
propaganda worked so well that even today more than half of all
Americans wrongly believe that Saddam had WMDs and was behind 9/11. ...
Big Lies continue. This administration has produced hundreds of fake
news stories that have been aired on TV across the country as news,
constituting what the GAO, the investigative arm of
Congress, calls illegal ’covert propaganda.’" Stauber is executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy.

FRANCIS BOYLE, http://www.impeach-bush-now.org
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois, in
October of 2002 Boyle launched a campaign to impeach Bush. He said
today: "The Bush administration was lying about WMD in Iraq right from
the get-go, and those of us in the American peace movement were saying
so at the time, beginning as of late August in 2002 when Vice President
Cheney went public with these absurd charges for the express purpose of
mongering for war with the American people and the U.S. Congress. ...
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are now desperately trying to have U.S.
intelligence agencies take the fall...."

Further background from the Institute for Public Accuracy:

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