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Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Minister Says
I know that it's the New York Times, and I know y'all hate registering. But this is a 4-pager, and I am not going to post the whole thing and gobble up Fred's bandwidth.In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. Didn't the administration say that, way back when? The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away. Again, didn't the administration say that, way back when? Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them. "They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting." And again: Didn't the administration say that, way back when? The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the chaotic months after the invasion. Yes, it seems they did. Dr. Araji's statements came just a week after a United Nations agency disclosed that approximately 90 important sites in Iraq had been looted or razed in that period. Or possibly shortly before the invasion, possibly even the reason for the many trucks observed via satellite driving back and forth between Iraq and Syria and further to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley? Satellite imagery analyzed by two United Nations groups - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic - confirms that some of the sites identified by Dr. Araji appear to be totally or partly stripped, senior officials at those agencies said. Those officials said they could not comment on all of Dr. Araji's assertions, because the groups had been barred from Iraq since the invasion. Weren't they also barred from Iraq for some time before the invasion as well? Hmmm. For nearly a year, the two agencies have sent regular reports to the United Nations Security Council detailing evidence of the dismantlement of Iraqi military installations and, in a few cases, the movement of Iraqi gear to other countries. In addition, a report issued last October by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, told of evidence of looting at crucial sites. Gosh, they have? How come we haven't read anything about it in the New York Times before this? The disclosures by the Iraqi ministry, however, added new information about the thefts, detailing the timing, the material taken and the apparent skill shown by the thieves. Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. Oh, really? After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments. But I thought Saddam Hussein wasn't doing that kind of stuff. Isn't that why we really hadn't needed to actually invade? "Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private nonprofit organization in Washington that tracks the spread of unconventional weapons. Dr. Araji said he believed that the looters themselves were more interested in making money than making weapons. Yes, but you don't have to worry about protecting the rest of the world. And the nasty stuff is already, by your own account, beyond your borders. So your people are probably safe. For the moment, anyway. The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case, investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. I do remember reading something about that, somewhere. But it wasn't in the New York TImes. The vessels could be used for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical weapons. Here endeth the first page. Posted by: trailing wife 2005-03-14 |
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