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Saddam rooked by North Koreans
North Korea's wily dictator, Kim Jong-il, bilked Saddam Hussein out of $10 million in an aborted deal to smuggle ballistic missile technology and other prohibited military equipment to Iraq shortly before the war, the chief U.S. weapons hunter said Friday.
heh heh - now why don't I feel bad?
The no-honor-among-tyrants case is the first solid evidence that Iraq and North Korea were directly conducting clandestine business deals in violation of the United Nations arms embargo, senior Bush administration officials said. The case is only one of several illegal Iraqi military procurement schemes uncovered by U.S. investigators since they began scouring Iraq early last summer for evidence of Saddam's suspected weapons of mass destruction, according to David Kay, head of the weapons-hunting teams. Other nations, including several in Europe, plus companies and individuals also are under investigation, he said, but he declined to name them.
yet
How significant such deals were is a matter of obfuscation debate. Kay, speaking to reporters in a conference call organized by the CIA, insisted he had uncovered a "rather remarkable amount" of evidence, from smuggling schemes to hidden laboratories, that Iraq had concealed from U.N. weapons inspectors. Had the Security Council known during this spring, he said, "I'm confident there would have been an uproar."
I'm not so confident, David. They all knew what was going on, that's why there was no demand for an ongoing independent audit of the "Oil for Palaces" program
But Hans "Dixie" Blix, the Swedish diplomat who led the U.N. inspectors until the war began, said Kay's unclassified report showed only "some fairly minor items that should have been declared" to the United Nations and that they probably would not have affected council deliberations.
"Nothing to see here - all old news - go about your business of undermining the US reconstruction of Iraq"
"It's a long way from finding some minor things, as they did, to concluding Iraq was an imminent danger," Blix said in a telephone interview from Stockholm Syndome , Sweden. Blix said most of Kay's discoveries "don't seem very big, and some may be legitimate dual-use items," or those allowed under U.N. rules because they have civilian uses. "In many cases, Kay's report says they may be suitable for this or suitable for that," Blix added. "Well, a butcher's knife is also suitable for murder."
What a pathetic piece of shit - tell me again how this quisling got to be where he was?
So far, Kay said the group has found the greatest surprises in Saddam's previously unknown efforts to develop and build medium- and long-range missiles able to fly well beyond the limit imposed by U.N. resolutions.
and threaten his neighbors
He said plans and advanced design work were found for three kinds of rockets able to fly at least 625 miles and thus capable of hitting the capitals of Turkey, Egypt or Dubai. Iraq also had launched a secret "crash program" to extend the range of old Soviet-era SAM-2 missiles, and to convert Silkworm anti-ship cruise missiles to land-attack missiles. The missiles Iraq sought to buy from North Korea, called the Nodong, have a range of just over 800 miles. Kay said his investigators discovered that Saddam's regime negotiated and signed a contract with Pyongyang in late 1999 and paid $10 million in advance to secretly purchase Nodong missile technology, as well as other prohibited military equipment, in violation of U.N. sanctions.
Blockade justification right there
Late last year, Kay said, the Iraqis demanded, " 'Where is the stuff we paid for?' And the North Koreans said, 'Sorry, there's so much U.S. attention on us that we cannot deliver it.' And the Iraqis said, 'Well, we don't like this, but give us our $10 million back.' "
"A cement freighter will be on the way, effendi"
In addition to the North Korea case, Kay's investigators have found scores of tantalizing leads, shifty suspects and strong clues about Saddam's covert weapons plans and programs, but none of the chemical, biological or nuclear arms that were one of the Bush administration's chief justifications for going to war. Speaking in Milwaukee, President Bush contended that the report supports many of his administration's prewar claims about Saddam's weapons programs. "It states that Saddam Hussein's regime had a clandestine network of biological laboratories," Bush said. "They had a live strain of deadly agent called botulinum. And he had sophisticated concealment efforts. In other words, he's hiding his program."
"And now he's hiding himself"
A network of two dozen laboratories and safe houses was secretly set up and maintained by Iraqi intelligence services, Kay said in his conference call. He said investigators have visited the facilities and equipment in them was "suitable" for chemical or biological weapons research and should have been declared to the United Nations. As for the botulinum, Kay said an Iraqi scientist, whom he did not identify, had stored a single vial of the live toxin, as well as a more virulent pathogen, in his kitchen refrigerator at home in 1993. Kay said the scientist had small children and grew fearful "after a couple of days," so he returned the more toxic vial to his boss.
"My freezers just packed! Could you hold onto this?"
But Kay said the stored sample of botulinum was still "viable" after a decade and thus could be used to create a biological warfare agent. His report notes that the scientist passed a polygraph about Saddam's plans to reconstitute a bioweapons programs, and that he told investigators about "a large cache" of microbe agents. Teams are "actively searching for this second cache," Kay reported.
Hmmmm
Posted by: Frank G 2003-10-04
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=19463