Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat

[NNN0LHI]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/washpost/20031026/ts_washpost/a17707_2003oct25&cid=1802&ncid=1480

In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.

That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

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[Spazito]

1. Excellent Article!

It is long but well worth the read. Thanks for the link.

[kodi]

2. the post article was atrocious

it read like a dime-store crime novel mystery, repleate with double mcguffin's, misdirections, and distractions from the real news. it was not a concise report of the facts, purposely not so.

it obfusticated the actual news it was supposed to deliver, viz., that there was no iraqi nuke program at the time when bush and cheney and powell and rice said there was, and what this implied having these varmints taking the US to war.

there was little in that article that any denizen of this site has not already known for at least 9 months.

plowing thru 4 pages of it revealed how much that the author had to try to hide in plain sight.

[Spazito]

3. What this article did, imo, was to take all the separate incidences...

regarding what was portrayed as found, what it really was, who was involved and the dates and put them in one neat, albeit long, package. I found the message throughout to be very clear, nothing was found that validated Bush's illegal war.

[diplomats]

4. Josh Marshall calls it "devastating"

One key graf from the devastating article on Iraq's 'nuclear program' in tomorrow's Post ...
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Nuthin ... No program. Nothing.
And how might the Post have come by those "closely held internal judgments" ...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Goody the plot thickens

and no we are still missing prima fasciae evidence to
justify the casus belli... you think the boys in the WH
would be nervous by now