The Fig
Leaf of Moral Impotence
by
Imad Khadduri
Former Iraqi Nuclear Scientist
Dissident Voice
March 11, 2003
On
March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), submitted, in accordance with U.N. Resolution 1441, his
third report to the Security Council on Iraq's nuclear non-capability.
ElBaradei's report
unequivocally disproved most of Colin Powell's alleged "evidence" of
Iraq's continued nuclear weapons program after the end of the 1991 war that
Powell so brazenly offered in a theatrical presentation to the same Security
Council just a month earlier on February 5, 2003. Powell's pathetic response to
ElBaradei's report would be laughable were it not for the moral crime the Bush
administration is about to commit in Iraq.
ElBaradei's report confirmed
the following:
The alleged Iraqi attempt of
procuring Niger's uranium in the late nineties was based on unauthentic
documents supplied by American and British intelligence. This brings to mind
the "scientific report" hurriedly brought by UNSCOM inspectors to
Baghdad in 1994 demanding an explanation of the report's claims of a continued
effort by Iraq to develop its nuclear bomb design in the years following the
1991 war. As part of my responsibility in the issuance and archiving of all
scientific reports emanating from the nuclear weapons development program
before the 1991 war (except for the centrifugal enrichment process), it was not
difficult to discern the intimate knowledge and accuracy of the authors'
competence in preparing that fake report with regards to the intricacies of our
own documentation procedures. However, the tell-tale use of Iranian synonyms
for key words employed in that fake report, such as the reference to the two
part core of the atomic bomb as a "dome" in Iranian parlance instead
of the "hemisphere" as used by Iraqi scientists, quickly laid to rest
the authenticity of that fake report. With the aid of an Iranian-Arabic
dictionary that we provided to the UNSCOM inspectors, they left without further
ado.
The aluminum tube fiasco, so
widely publicized on America's CNN and FOX networks, has been proven to be a
reverse-engineering attempt by Iraqi military engineers to manufacture locally
the combustion chamber for a solid propellant rocket. That attempt extends back
to the mid-eighties. The extra tolerances, to which Powell so despairingly
clung in his unabashed retort, were no more than extra precautionary steps on
the part of the engineers to ensure the success of their attempts. One may
assume that these engineers would have indeed been surprised to learn from the
American "experts" that such tolerances, if further pursued, would be
suited for equipment in a uranium centrifuge process.
Having forbidden, under the
economic sanctions, the import of pencils to Iraq for fear that the graphite
inserts might be used for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons, the
attempt to produce locally small magnets for all sorts of civilian use was
interpreted in the fertile imagination of the American "experts" as
proof of a possible rejuvenation of a uranium centrifugal enrichment process.
ElBaradei's team of scientific experts in the field of uranium centrifugal
enrichment, which probably has cost millions of dollars paid by Iraqi funds
from the Oil for Food program, confirmed the simple and evident truth: the
unfettered civilian use of such magnets.
Only the fourth and final
fictitious piece of "evidence" presented by Powell in his February 5,
2003 report to the Security Council was unfortunately missing from ElBaradei's
exposition. Powell deliberately lied, either knowingly or deceived by Iraqi
defectors' lies, when he claimed that the declarations we, as Iraqi scientists,
had signed several times upon the penalty of death prevented the Iraqi
scientists from exposing sensitive information to the inspectors. The truth of
the matter is that these declarations ordered us not to hide any sensitive
reports and documents in our homes. The Iraqi government did not want to be
held responsible for hidden documents when the U.N. began to inspect Iraq. We
signed four or five such declarations starting in 1992. The last such pledge
was conducted in the middle of 1997. The head of the Military Industrialization
Corporation, the agency in charge of all chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons development, assembled and chaired a meeting of about six hundred
senior Iraqi scientists and engineers from all walks of activities in the above
fields. He pointed to the fact that we had already signed a few of these
declarations. He was willing to forgo all of the previous declarations if we
would sign one final such declaration. In order to save us any further
embarrassment or unintended folly, he urged us to go back to our homes,
farmhouses and family lodgings and do one final thorough search for these
documents. In the event that we did find some documents that we had
inadvertently missed during our initial searches, we were to put them in a
nameless envelope, and deposit them on a table in an empty assigned room,
without any questions asked, with full reprieve from the previously signed
declarations. He gave us three days to carry out that final search. We signed
the final declaration as we left that meeting in 1997. Is the information
provided by American intelligence services that systematically distorted?
During my recent FOX TV
Heartland show interview with John Kasich about a week ago, I was one
dimensionally bombarded with flimsy arguments by the anchor on the abundance of
"Iraqi defectors have told of nuclear weapon sites" and who am I to
refute Khidhir Hamza, the infamous "bombmaker" who has been claiming
the existence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program for a year now on CNN, along
with speaking to American congressional committees and right wing "think
tanks." What is stopping these defectors from informing ElBaradei and the
UNMOVIC inspectors on the ground in Iraq of the locations of these phantom
establishments for the production of these weapons or their components?
Two weeks ago, CBS declined
to interview me for the "60 Minutes" show after they were
"counseled" by a well paid consultant from Washington D.C., who
claimed to be a former UNSCOM inspector. The consultant warned CBS that the CIA
had a wealth of information, unknown to me, on the existence of a continuing
nuclear weapons development program in Iraq throughout the nineties. If this were
true, why wouldn't the CIA save Colin Powell's face and provide this
information to the IAEA and UNMOVIC? The American and British intelligence
services did in fact provide, upon Blix's challenge to them in mid-December of
2002, a list of about 25 suspected sites, one of them marked red for extra
"hush hush" care in case the Iraqis got wind of the information and
would try to hide the evidence. The inspectors duly visited and inspected each
one of these sites and they found nothing incriminating. In fact, they even
stated that U.S. intelligence was providing them with nothing but "garbage
after garbage after garbage." Is the American media that systematically
manipulating the American people?
Unabashedly, Bush gave a
speech on March 07, 2003, portraying the gathering dark clouds of a criminal
war against Iraq, in the terms of a poker game. He challenged other countries
opposed to the criminal war to "show their cards" while the U.S. and
the U.K. would conveniently keep their cards hidden.
Lest he misses the point, he
is playing a game of Russian roulette, and his fig leaf has fallen.
Imad Khadduri has an MSc in
Physics from the University of Michigan (United States) and a PhD in Nuclear
Reactor Technology from the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). Khadduri
worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 till 1998. He was able
to leave Iraq in late 1998 with his family. He now teaches and works as a
network administrator in Toronto, Canada. Email: imad.khadduri@rogers.com. This article
first appeared at Yellow Times.org