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| Axis of Evil |
| Iraq Illegally Imported Missile Engines Last Year |
| 2003-01-10 |
| Iraq has illegally imported missile engines and fuel and unsuccessfully tried to buy aluminum tubes, but it is unclear they were meant for banned weapons, UN arms inspectors told the Security Council Thursday, January 9. "Mahmoud, order two dozen missile engines, wouldja?" "Sure, boss. We ain't gonna use them in missiles, are we?" "No, no! Certainly not!" "Well, what are we gonna use them for?" "Ummm... Something else." "Inspections have confirmed the presence of a relatively large number of missile engines, some imported as late as 2002," chief UN inspector Hans Blix said in a statement to the council made available to Agence France-Presse (AFP). In a three-hour closed briefing, Blix told the council Iraq had also imported raw materials for the production of solid rocket fuel. "But that doesn't mean they were gonna use it in rocket fuel. There's other uses it could be put to." "Like what?" "Explosives." All military sales to Iraq are banned under council resolutions adopted after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. But the resolutions do not forbid Iraq to have conventional arms. They do bar Iraq from possessing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles with a range of 150 kilometers (93 miles) or more, and insist on the destruction of those already in Iraqi hands. "There! See? I took the warhead off. It doesn't work without the warhead, so mark that one destroyed..." Blix said the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission had yet to determine whether the imported engines were intended for missiles in that category. "There's no smoking gun," Blix said yesterday, as the bullets from the smoke-free weapon whizzed around his ears. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #1 The very fact that they havent found anything is a material breach. It says very clearly that Iraq has taken steps to hide and obfuscate those items there are were known (and admitted by them!) to be in their possession in 1992. Has the UN inspectors ever found a weapon on any of their monmitoring tasks? They monitored the North Koreans for 10 years and never reported any problems, all while the NK govt admitted that they were in fact working on weapons the entire time! I still believe that the best weapons inspectors in the world, the only ones with a measureable track record at disarming tyrants, is the 101st Airborne. |
| Posted by: Frank Martin 2003-01-10 15:59:39 |