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Rick Rozoff's great digging again - Stop NATO. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/04/1031037092697.html Sydney Morning Herald The nuke-free guided tour of Iraq By Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad September 4 2002 Akashat is a long way to go to see something that is not there. After three hours in a rattling Russian helicopter, one of Baghdad's most senior weapons scientists clambered through the bomb-flattened remains of what he said had been Iraq's only uranium extraction plant, before declaring: "We don't do it any more." In the stifling heat of the desert, just a few kilometres short of where the Euphrates River crosses into Iraq from Syria, Mohammed Hussam Amin escorted the Herald to this dusty industrial complex which has emerged as a possible source of uranium for Saddam Hussein's feared new nuclear weapons program. United States and European intelligence agencies are focusing on the plant, which was a small part of a rambling fertiliser factory, because its past as a domestic supply of uranium means that United Nations sanctions would not necessarily have denied Saddam a vital ingredient. This reporter is not a scientist and he did not have access to the rest of the complex or to any of a string of other locations named as possible centres in a dispersed new Iraqi attempt to go nuclear. But this much of what Dr Amin said yesterday, seems to be true: More than 70 US air raids on the Company of Phosphate during the 1991 Gulf War destroyed the Belgian-supplied uranium extraction plant, which, in the seven years until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, had produced 168 tonnes of yellowcake. Dr Amin, a missiles expert who now heads Iraq's weapons monitoring agency, had a folder of photos of the imposing structure that existed before the attacks; more that were taken of the shambles in the aftermath of the bombing; and an account of how the site had become the near-vacant lot it appeared to be yesterday, as the result of a clean-up supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The hawkish majority in the Bush Administration is basing its call for a war against Iraq on claims that the US must strike first because there is "no doubt" that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and is prepared to use them against the US and its allies. Germany's Federal Intelligence Service last year raised suspicions about work it said was being done at Akashat, also referred to as Al Qaim, in a report predicting Saddam would be able to make a nuclear strike on his neighbours within three years, and on targets in Europe within five years. The extraction of uranium in conjunction with the mining of phosphate for the Akashat fertiliser works was raised at hearings by the US Senate's foreign relations committee last month. Richard Butler, the Australian who formerly headed the UN weapons inspection program, quoted to senators from an IAEA estimation that Saddam could produce a nuclear weapon in two years; and Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994, told the hearings Baghdad might be able to develop two or three nuclear warheads by 2005. But there are deep divisions in the ranks of Mr Butler's former inspection staff on Iraq's nuclear capacity. In March, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, promised a dossier that would prove Iraq had gone beyond the stage of nuclear blueprints, but he has not released any. And when the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was pressed on the veracity of the intelligence last week, he said: "We cannot really judge." Recently, Mr Hamza spelt out the risks as he saw them: "Iraq already had a workable nuclear design when I left. A minor enrichment capability is all that was needed to provide the nuclear core for three weapons." But a "fact sheet" released by the IAEA in April stated that in the early 1990s it removed 22.4 kilograms of highly-enriched, weapons-grade uranium from Iraq. It says it was convinced the "intrusive" inspections it was able to carry out until 1998 had found all the weapons-grade uranium Iraq had at the time. The Vienna-based organisation also destroyed what it described as several "sophisticated facilities" where uranium could be enriched to make it "weapons-useable". Now, the fate of the inspection process that was derailed in 1998 is working its way back to the centre of the Iraq crisis. Flying in over parched earth, where the only shade away from the green ribbon of the banks of the Euphrates was the fleeting shadow cast by our ME-8 chopper, Dr Amin fleshed out the detail of what seemed to be a coy offer by Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, to accept a return to inspections. The US has argued recently that inspections are meaningless because of Iraqi deception, and Iraq has said more inspections are not an option because the US would use them to acquire targeting information for bombing. But when Mr Aziz was asked about the inspection process, he seemed to be leaving the door open when he said: "It is still under consideration." Amid the remaining missile-gouged walls and tangled steel reinforcing what was the site of the uranium extraction plant, Dr Amin yesterday spread his hands to take in the total destruction: "To talk about this having been rehabilitated to produce uranium is a false pretext. We have invited Mr Blair and Congress to bring their experts to look. That invitation still stands - and they can go anywhere they like." Anywhere? Saddam's palaces? "I said anywhere, but I didn't say the palaces. But let them produce quality evidence on why they want to go wherever they want to go; a satellite picture is not enough, they need to be able to demonstrate why they want to go to places. They can't come in here and dig up a dairy farm to look for a bunker under it unless they can show some evidence. If they were allowed to do that, it would become a never-ending process." A persistent question about the weapons programs that Saddam's officials insist have been abandoned is the fate of their specialist staff. When the Herald asked about the antecedents of the staff at a suspect pesticide factory on Sunday, we were told more than 80 per cent had come from al Muthanna, one of Iraq's old chemical and biological complexes. But when Dr Amin was asked yesterday about the estimated two dozen nuclear specialists known to have worked on nuclear weapons in the past, he said: "I don't know if we had 25 or 100 or 10 nuclear scientists, but none of them is working here. They would now be working in state enterprises to help the people - industry, education, agriculture. I think the IAEA knows where they are." Late in the afternoon the chopper fleet that took Dr Amin's party of about 40 to Akashat, headed back to Baghdad, putting down at the Al Rasheed military complex. And there on the tarmac, as our war-weary old helicopters shuddered to a halt, were another three bedraggled looking aircraft that weren't going anywhere in a hurry - the white-painted UN helicopters that have been sitting idle since the last international inspectors left Iraq in 1998. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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