November 20, 2005

The U.N. : Hussein Dismantled Facilities Capable of Producing WMDs During the War

OSM is doing a Carnival of posts about pre-Iraq war intelligence. Here's my contribution.

In June of 2004, the United Nations reported that Iraq busted up and shipped out of Iraq, facilities capable of producing banned weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, specifically chemical and biological WMDs. This took place during the war. The New York Times reported this as follows:

Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been emptied from Iraqi sites since the war started and shipped abroad, the head of the United Nations inspectors office told the Security Council on Wednesday.

Demetrius Perricos, deputy to the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and now the acting executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told a closed session of the council that many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect dual-use materials having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons.

Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel -- all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

''It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for,'' Mr. Buchanan said.

He said that a fermenter was a good example of a dual-use item that was potentially dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. ''You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter,'' he said. ''You can also use it to breed anthrax.''

The NY Times reported this once, on page 12, and never followed up on it.

If MSM had followed up on this story, the way they do on things like Abu Ghraib, there would have been two months of front page stories asking things like:

• What was Hussein using those facilities to make?
• If Hussein wasn't using them to make WMD's, why were they dismantled during the war?
• What was Hussein hiding by dismantling those facilities?
  

..and this whole debate about the supposed absence of WMD programs in Iraq at the time of the war would be over. 

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Categories: Iraq, The U.N.

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