"The Fig Leaf Of Moral Impotence"

On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International AtomicEnergy Agency (IAEA), submitted, in accordance with U.N. Resolution 1441, his third report to the SecurityCouncil 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 sobrazenly 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 theBush administration is about to commit in Iraq.

ElBaradei's report confirmed that the alleged Iraqi attempt of procuring Niger'suranium 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 UNSCOMinspectors to Baghdad in 1994 demanding an explanation of the report's claims of a continued effort by Iraq todevelop its nuclear bomb design in the years following the 1991 war.

As part of my responsibility in the issuance and archiving of all scientific reportsemanating from the nuclear weapons development program before the 1991 war (except for the centrifugalenrichment 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 fakereport, such as the reference to the two part core of the atomic bomb as a "dome" in Iranianparlance instead of the "hemisphere" as used by Iraqi scientists, quickly laid to rest theauthenticity of that fake report. With the aid of an Iranian-Arabic dictionary that we provided to the UNSCOMinspectors, they left without further ado.

The aluminum tube fiasco, so widely publicized on America's CNN and FOX networks, hasbeen proven to be a reverse-engineering attempt by Iraqi military engineers to manufacture locally thecombustion chamber for a solid propellant rocket. That attempt extends back to the mid-eighties. The extratolerances, to which Powell so despairingly clung in his unabashed retort, were no more than extraprecautionary steps on the part of the engineers to ensure the success of their attempts. One may assume thatthese engineers would have indeed been surprised to learn from the American "experts" that suchtolerances, 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 forfear that the graphite inserts might be used for the purpose of developing nuclear weapons, the attempt toproduce locally small magnets for all sorts of civilian use was interpreted in the fertile imagination of theAmerican "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 costmillions 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 byPowell in his February 5, 2003 report to the Security Council was unfortunately missing from ElBaradei'sexposition. Powell deliberately lied, either knowingly or deceived by Iraqi defectors' lies, when he claimedthat the declarations we, as Iraqi scientists, had signed several times upon the penalty of death preventedthe Iraqi scientists from exposing sensitive information to the inspectors.

The truth of the matter is that these declarations ordered us not to hide anysensitive reports and documents in our homes. The Iraqi government did not want to be held responsible forhidden documents when the U.N. began to inspect Iraq. We signed four or five such declarations starting in1992. The last such pledge was conducted in the middle of 1997.

The head of the Military Industrialization Corporation, the agency in charge of allchemical, biological and nuclear weapons development, assembled and chaired a meeting of about six hundredsenior Iraqi scientists and engineers from all walks of activities in the above fields. He pointed to the factthat we had already signed a few of these declarations. He was willing to forgo all of the previousdeclarations if we would sign one final such declaration.

In order to save us any further embarrassment or unintended folly, he urged us to goback to our homes, farmhouses and family lodgings and do one final thorough search for these documents. In theevent that we did find some documents that we had inadvertently missed during our initial searches, we were toput them in a nameless envelope, and deposit them on a table in an empty assigned room, without any questionsasked, with full reprieve from the previously signed declarations. He gave us three days to carry out thatfinal search. We signed the final declaration as we left that meeting in 1997. Is the information provided byAmerican intelligence services that systematically distorted?

During my recent FOX TV Heartland show interview with John Kasich about a week ago, Iwas one dimensionally bombarded with flimsy arguments by the anchor on the abundance of "Iraqi defectorshave 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 withspeaking to American congressional committees and right wing "think tanks." What is stopping thesedefectors from informing ElBaradei and the UNMOVIC inspectors on the ground in Iraq of the locations of thesephantom establishments for the production of these weapons or their components?

Two weeks ago, CBS declined to interview me for the "60 Minutes" show afterthey were "counseled" by a well paid consultant from Washington D.C., who claimed to be a formerUNSCOM inspector. The consultant warned CBS that the CIA had a wealth of information, unknown to me, on theexistence 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 thisinformation to the IAEA and UNMOVIC? The American and British intelligence services did in fact provide, uponBlix's challenge to them in mid-December of 2002, a list of about 25 suspected sites, one of them marked redfor extra "hush hush" care in case the Iraqis got wind of the information and would try to hide theevidence. The inspectors duly visited and inspected each one of these sites and they found nothingincriminating. 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 theAmerican people?

Unabashedly, Bush gave a speechrecently, 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. andthe U.K. would conveniently keep their cards hidden.

Lest he misses the point, he is playing a game of Russian roulette, and his fig leafhas fallen.

Imad Khadduri has a 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 workedwith the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. He was able to leave Iraq in late 1998 with hisfamily. He now teaches and works as a network administrator in Toronto, Canada. He has been interviewed by theUnited Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, FOX, the Toronto Star, Reuters, and various other newsagencies in regards to his knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear program. This article was originally printed inYellowTimes.org.