skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The father of Iraq's nuclear bomb program denied Monday that Saddam Hussein tried to restart his atomic activities, but acknowledged Iraq tried to conceal its banned weapons operations before destroying them 13 years ago.
Jafar Dhia Jafar, speaking publicly for the first time since U.S. forces occupied Baghdad, also called for a U.N. probe of what its inspectors knew before the U.S.-led invasion. Inspectors "reached total conviction" that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons yet failed to convey that to the Security Council because of U.S. pressure, he said.
"Reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous," Jafar said.
Before the invasion last March, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and his nuclear counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that in four months of searching, their teams found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them, and needed more time to make a definitive conclusion.
Asked to respond to Jafar's claims, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said ElBaradei was forthright to the Security Council. She rejected the idea that investigators were absolutely convinced Iraq had no weapons program.
...
At the time, U.S. officials insisted Saddam was developing a nuclear weapons program. After the war, U.S. inspectors also found no signs of a revived program. Still, David Kay, the chief U.S. inspector who resigned in January, contended last October he found "evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons." That evidence has not been made public.
...
"Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried out by the Special Republican Guard forces," the scientists said in their paper.