New report From the UN
- Thread starter nbcrusader
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nbcrusader
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I hope it is true if it means that the WMD can be tracked down...
deep
Blue Crack Addict
nbcrusader said:
The publisher of this article does not sound reliable to me.
http://www.worldtribune.com/WorldTribune/purp.html
A few dozen people have been tortured to death is search of evidence.
I think it is less and less likely that WMDs existed brfore the war.
deep
Blue Crack Addict
not quite a "smoking gun"
Well, upon further checking here is a similar article in mainstream printed press.
"Suspect Items From Iraq Shipped Abroad, U.N. Says
AP
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, June 9 - 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."
Another photo showed an engine from a banned SA-2 surface-to-air missile that had been tagged by the United Nations in Iraq in 1996 and recently discovered in a scrap yard in Rotterdam, the port city in the Netherlands.
The report said that workers there had told inspectors from the monitoring commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency that as many as 12 such engines may have passed through the yard in January and February this year and that additional items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys with the inscriptions "Iraq" and "Baghdad" had been observed since November 2003.
"This is only a snapshot," Mr. Buchanan said. Two inspectors, he said, acting on information from the Netherlands, went to scrap yards in Jordan last week and found 20 more such engines in addition to tagged processing equipment such as chemical reactors, heat exchangers and a solid propellent mixing bowl.
"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," he said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors." Inspectors are hoping to check scrap yards in Turkey, he said.
Last month, The New York Times reported that large quantities of new reconstruction equipment and sensitive military material is being plundered in Iraq and trucked to Jordan to be sold as scrap. Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned the Security Council in April that nuclear facilities were unguarded and that large amounts of material, some of it contaminated, were being smuggled out of the country.
The United Nations inspectors were removed from Iraq just before the war broke out in March 2003 and, the report says, have been ignored by the American-led Iraq Survey Group that has been searching for arms since then.
In the negotiations leading to Tuesday's passage of a Security Council resolution on Iraq, Russia pressed for inclusion in the measure of language promising to reinvigorate the United Nations inspectors, but the final version simply pledged to "revisit" their mandate."
Well, upon further checking here is a similar article in mainstream printed press.
"Suspect Items From Iraq Shipped Abroad, U.N. Says
AP
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, June 9 - 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."
Another photo showed an engine from a banned SA-2 surface-to-air missile that had been tagged by the United Nations in Iraq in 1996 and recently discovered in a scrap yard in Rotterdam, the port city in the Netherlands.
The report said that workers there had told inspectors from the monitoring commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency that as many as 12 such engines may have passed through the yard in January and February this year and that additional items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys with the inscriptions "Iraq" and "Baghdad" had been observed since November 2003.
"This is only a snapshot," Mr. Buchanan said. Two inspectors, he said, acting on information from the Netherlands, went to scrap yards in Jordan last week and found 20 more such engines in addition to tagged processing equipment such as chemical reactors, heat exchangers and a solid propellent mixing bowl.
"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," he said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors." Inspectors are hoping to check scrap yards in Turkey, he said.
Last month, The New York Times reported that large quantities of new reconstruction equipment and sensitive military material is being plundered in Iraq and trucked to Jordan to be sold as scrap. Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned the Security Council in April that nuclear facilities were unguarded and that large amounts of material, some of it contaminated, were being smuggled out of the country.
The United Nations inspectors were removed from Iraq just before the war broke out in March 2003 and, the report says, have been ignored by the American-led Iraq Survey Group that has been searching for arms since then.
In the negotiations leading to Tuesday's passage of a Security Council resolution on Iraq, Russia pressed for inclusion in the measure of language promising to reinvigorate the United Nations inspectors, but the final version simply pledged to "revisit" their mandate."
Maybe I'm being dense, but why does the publisher not sounds reliable? It's a fact that before 9/11 the American media had been scaling back it's oversaes correspondents. In fact on 9/11 the only network able to effectively cover the perspective from the Arab world was NPR because they had reporters there. So how is this site unreliable?
A_Wanderer
ONE love, blood, life
Is this is in relation to the discovery of yellowcake (uranium oxide), Al Sumoud II missile engines and a lot of Iraqi WMD program stuff in a dutch scrap metal yard, remember that this was all obtained from a Jordanian after the war. I wouldnt be suprised if we know the truth about it all in the next 5 years but I think stories like this only add to the evidence that Saddam still held banned weapons and not only weapons programs.
Popmartijn
Blue Crack Supplier
A_Wanderer said:
Well, the report says they have noticed that dual-use equipment and tagged missiles (thus, marked by the UN as having inspected it and knowing of its existence) have gone over the border. They use photo's of May 2003 (just after the US invasion of Iraq) and of February 2004. To me, it doesn't sound like Saddam shipped out WMD out of Iraq, but rather that there are no controls to prevent people from looting certain sites and selling off the equipment.
C ya!
Marty
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