I just received this from one of my old conspiracy collaborators. It's likely to make some rounds of other conspiracy sites in the very near future (RMN, rense, etc.) ... but we may have it first.

I have no way of confirming this (yet) but am throwing it out for discussion. I'm looking for this original article, but this source is not a paranoic...



(Source:wsj 18.7.03)

THE {WALL STREET JOURNAL}
SAYS IRAQ'S BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROGRAM WAS SCRAPPED back in the early 1990s.

Shakir al-Akidy, the Iraqi scientist who headed up the weapons program, said in an interview that after a test with ricin had been conducted in the desert, and failed, in later 1990, Iraq officials had scrapped the entire effort.

This is important, since, as the {WSJ} notes, Iraq's alleged production of powerful ricin was one of the items used to argue for war.

"The 7.6 liters of ricin Iraq is known to have produced was enough to kill more than one million people' if properly concentrated, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in a January speech to the Council on Foreign Relations," the paper writes.

General Myers is quoted as having also said in a February Pentagon briefing, that Iraq had given terror groups "'help in making explosives and poisons, such a ricin.'"

Dr. al-Akidy's story was confirmed by another leading Iraqi scientist, Loay Abdul Rathman. Dr. al-Akidy was found by UN inspectors with documents, in 1996, about ricin, which all referred back to the 1990 work. He was jailed in 1997 by Iraqi authorities for having collaborated with the UN.

More recently, last December, he refused to be interviewed by UN inspectors, fearing he would be imprisoned again. On that basis alone, the United States said it believed Iraq could still be researching and/or producing ricin.



thoughts?

Very interesting...
But why didn't they just said that four months ago. They were so secretive about their biological program, they never clearly said they cancelled it.
Kind of foolish by al-Akidy not to contact the UN, when he knew Iraq stopped it's program, now it's too late

That is entirely possible since

1. Inspectors have found no WMD
2. This was not only the official but also the inofficial claim of many Iraqi officials
3. Western intelligence pointed to that fact
4. People claiming otherwise have been unmasked as liars
5. All 'huge weapons caches' discovered until now were hoaxes
6. Bush's rush to war can now be explained by the lack of incriminating evidence against Iraq : he attacked before it was possible for the western intelligence and UN inspectors to establish a WMD-free Iraq beyond doubt ...

This diffently raises alot of questions.
Even in light of the article/report saying that Iraq dismantled its BWP, can the article thus guarentee that Saddam, at a later time period, was not again attempting to re-establish this very same program?
I really don't see the article being "proof" that Saddam was not trying to re-establish his BMP or for that matter, that Saddam doesn't have BMP's still in existence, somewhere. I mean, for example, "7.6 liters of ricin" can literally be hidden in such a way that it could never be found. So, for the sake of the example, if this "7.6 liters of ricin" can't be found, what does it really say? Either Saddam destroyed it, sold/got rid of it, or hid it and it is yet to be found. This is how I see the whole WMD issue. Its almost how I see this article.

Even "if" Saddam was not trying to re-establish a BMP, this doesn't account for the WMD that he had not reported as being destroyed, etc. According to the 1441 UN Resolution, Saddam was to notify the UN on any such information. The UN today still has records reflecting numerous amounts of bio and chemical WMD's that were unaccounted for.

Again, this article can be viewed in many a different ways and purposes. I don't agree whole-heartedly with alot of Bush's and his administrations "handlings of this crisis/situation", but I whole-heartedly believe Saddam had and has WMD. Lack of large amounts being found does not over shadow the little bit that has been found. Saddam showed all the signs of "probable cause." And just because the "gun" has not been found, though the bullet casings have, does not exclude him from being the killer.....
Just my thoughts.


regards
seekerof

Yes, Saddam was very good at baiting the Bush administration idiots, yes.

Originally posted by MaskedAvatar
Yes, Saddam was very good at baiting the Bush administration idiots, yes.

Seriously MA, I'm just trying to look at it openly. We have had our fair share of go around on this.
I think either the UN documents are flawed or they may indeed be correct. I guess time will only tell.
There are too many questions that need to be answered....by Bush and by Saddam.

regards
seekerof

I think there is some complicity between them based on past US-Iraq relations, yes.

One day, even the most loyal Bush sycophants will see that this whole agenda was pre-determined, independent of any performance by the UN, and the construction of an orchestrated campaign of lies attempting to justify that is not a good thing.

In fact, a very, very bad thing.

No new evidence on Iraq since 1998 UN inspections

PTI[ MONDAY, JULY 21, 2003 12:28:58 PM ]

NEW YORK: American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration now acknowledge that there was little new evidence flowing into US agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq in 1998, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your GPS guidance," a Pentagon official said, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other," the official told the New York Times.

The officials' remarks come after the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Prior to war, senior American officials had been insisting they had compelling evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programmes and belittled the inspectors for what they called failure to find the weapons despite intrusive searches.

"Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Vice President Dick Cheney had said last August, before the inspections resumed.

In a series of recent interviews with the Times, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the UN inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about movements of suspected terrorists.

Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired CIA officials that reviewed pre-war intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the CIA and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.

Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process". "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."

"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with WMD were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Kerr said.

Even so, the Times says, just days before President Bush's State of the Union address in January, Paul D Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date.

"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites ....but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing."

The paper said it was Cheney who, last September, was clearest about the fact that the US had only incomplete information. But he said that should not deter the country from taking action.

But the Times says within the White House, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle explaining the confusion about how the administration assembled its case.