and Sharon could place a bomb in the back side of Blair! If a newspaper publish such stupid supporting war evidences then at least it should deliver some verificable proofs. Everyone can make such headline of nonsense. No need to read the TIMES. Out of time... maybe

This is just part of the propaganda offensive that is underway to persuade us to back the attack on Iraq. We will be deluged over the next few months with articles placed carefully in newspapers of all descriptions (not excluding the Guardian, the Observer) to get us all warmed up for the bombing.

I suggest anyone who read the above who wants to discover the lies being told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that they should look up on the web the recent testimony of Scott Ritter

Yup, sure does.

What about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?

By ignoring or suppressing these facts, together with the scale of a four-year bombing campaign by American and British aircraft (in 1999/2000, according to the Pentagon, the US flew 24,000 "combat missions" over Iraq), journalists have prepared the ground for an all-out attack on Iraq. The official premise for this - that Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction - has not been questioned. In fact, in 1998, the UN reported that Iraq had complied with 90 per cent of its inspectors' demands. That the UN inspectors were not "expelled", but pulled out after American spies were found among them in preparation for an attack on Iraq, is almost never reported. Since then, the world's most sophisticated surveillance equipment has produced no real evidence that the regime has renewed its capacity to build weapons of mass destruction. "The real goal of attacking Iraq now," says Eric Herring, "is to replace Saddam Hussein with another compliant thug." -  http://www.zmag.org/content/MainstreamMedia/pilger_compliantpress.cfm

There is strong evidence that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have pretty much been destroyed. Earlier this year, Iraq fully cooperated with international nuclear weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter, a UN weapons inspector in Iraq for six years, asserts that 95% of Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons have been destroyed. On March 13, 2002, he wrote: "America claims that Iraq lied to inspectors and still has deadly stockpiles. But the Bush administration has shown little interest in sending the inspectors back. It has used their absence to hype the threat of a re-armed Iraq." Furthermore, the United States has presented no evidence that Iraq is harboring terrorists. -  http://www.rmpjc.org/STOP-THE-WAR-AGAINST-IRAQ/WarAgainstIraqDefiesLaw-March2002.html

What are sanctions for? Eradicating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, says the Security Council resolution. Scott Ritter, a chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq for five years, told me: "By 1998, the chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or destroyed by UNSCOM (the UN inspections body) or by Iraq in compliance with our mandate. The biological weapons programme was gone, all the major facilities eliminated. The nuclear weapons programme was completely eliminated. The long range ballistic missile programme was completely eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, I would say [it is] zero." Ritter resigned in protest at US interference; he and his American colleagues were expelled when American spy equipment was found by the Iraqis. To counter the risk of Iraq reconstituting its arsenal, he says the weapons inspectors should go back to Iraq after the immediate lifting of all non-military sanctions; the inspectors of the international Atomic Energy Agency are already back. At the very least, the two issues of sanctions and weapons inspection should be entirely separate. Madeleine Albright has said: "We do not agree that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted." If this means that Saddam Hussein is the target, then the embargo will go on indefinitely, holding Iraqis hostage to their tyrant's compliance with his own demise. Or is there another agenda? In January 1991, the Americans had an opportunity to press on to Baghdad and remove Saddam, but pointedly stopped short. A few weeks later, they not only failed to support the Kurdish and Shi'a uprising, which President Bush had called for, but even prevented the rebelling troops in the south from reaching captured arms depots and allowed Saddam Hussein's helicopters to slaughter them while US aircraft circled overhead. At they same time, Washington refused to support Iraqi opposition groups and Kurdish claims for independence." -  http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Iraq/pilger.htm

"Let's talk about the weapons. In 1991, did Iraq have a viable weapons of mass destruction capability? You're darn right they did. They had a massive chemical weapons program. They had a giant biological weapons program. They had long-range ballistic missiles and they had a nuclear weapons program that was about six months away from having a viable weapon.

"Now after seven years of work by UNSCOM inspectors, there was no more (mass destruction) weapons program. It had been eliminated....When I say eliminated I'm talking about facilities destroyed....

"The weapons stock had been, by and large, accounted for - removed, destroyed or rendered harmless. Means of production had been eliminated, in terms of the factories that can produce this...."There were some areas that we didn't have full accounting for. And this is what plagued UNSCOM. Security Council 687 is an absolute resolution. It requires that Iraq be disarmed 100 percent. It's what they call 'quantitative disarmament.' Iraq will not be found in compliance until it has been disarmed to a 100 percent level. That's the standard set forth by the Security Council and as implementors of the Security Council resolution, the weapons inspectors had no latitude to seek to do anything less than that - 80 percent was not acceptable; 90 percent was not acceptable; only 100 percent was acceptable.

"And this was the Achilles tendon, so to speak, of UNSCOM. Because by the time 1997 came around, Iraq had been qualitatively disarmed. On any meaningful benchmark - in terms of defining Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability; in terms of assessing whether or not Iraq posed a threat, not only to its immediate neighbors, but the region and the world as a whole - Iraq had been eliminated as such a threat....

"What was Iraq hiding? Documentation primarily - documents that would enable them to reconstitute - at a future date - weapons of mass destruction capability....But all of this is useless...unless Iraq has access to the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars required to rebuild the industrial infrastructure (necessary) to build these weapons. They didn't have it in 1998. They don't have it today. This paranoia about what Iraq is doing now that there aren't weapons inspectors reflects a lack of understanding of the reality in Iraq.

"The economic sanctions have devastated this nation. The economic sanctions, combined with the effects of the Gulf War, have assured that Iraq operate as a Third World nation in terms of industrial output and capacity. They have invested enormous resources in trying to build a 150-kilometer range ballistic missile called the Al Samoud.

"In 1998 they ran some flight tests of prototypes that they had built of this missile. They fizzled. One didn't get off the stand. The other flipped over on the stand and blew up. The other one got up in the air and then went out of control and blew up. They don't have the ability to produce a short-range ballistic missile yet alone a long-range ballistic missile....

"The other thing to realize is: they are allowed to build this missile. It's not against the law. The law says anything under 150 kilometers they can build and yet people are treating this missile as if it's a threat to regional security....It's a tactical battlefield missile, that's it. Yet, (Congressman Tom) Lantos and others treat this as though it's some sort of latent capability and requires a ballistic missile defense system to guard against it. It's ridiculous. Iraq has no meaningful weapons of mass destruction program today. -  http://www.commondreams.org/views/030700-106.htm

There is no latitude for inspectors to accept anything less than 100 percent disarmament, which, given the combined effect of the passage of time and Iraqi intransigence, leaves the inspectors in the nearly impossible position of trying to prove a negative. The reality that, from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq has in fact been disarmed has been ignored. The chemical, biological, nuclear, and long-range ballistic missile programs that were a real threat in 1991 had, by 1998, been destroyed or rendered harmless. -  http://www.commondreams.org/views/030900-101.htm

In early months of Bush administration, the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was not near the top of the foreign policy agenda. Revival of the issue after September 11 appeared primarily to be a pretext for settling unfinished business. Iraq's links to al-Qaeda have proved too tenuous to include Iraq directly in the "war on terrorism." Most recently, the FBI itself has raised doubts about the veracity of the story that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. Hence the weapons issue has now taken center stage, with the US invoking UN resolutions and hoping to rally international support on this basis.

The lack of clarity in Bush administration pronouncements inevitably signals to the Iraqi leadership that even if they were to comply with WMD inspections, the US would still try to oust them. As in the past, moving the goalposts on sanctions and arms control leaves the Iraqi government with a reason not to comply -- citing a "no-win" situation. Furthermore, the leadership's long-held belief in the usefulness of chemical and biological weapons would suggest they would be even more likely to conceal and try to retain them if they were faced with a major attack.

For the US, the worst-case scenario would be for the UN inspectors to declare Iraq free of banned weapons and therefore call for the lifting of sanctions. Fear of this eventuality may be behind recent attacks on the arms control record of Hans Blix, formerly head of the IAEA and now of UNMOVIC. Asked to investigate him by Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, doyen of the regime change crowd, the CIA found that Blix had conducted inspections within the IAEA's parameters. But Wolfowitz's approach fits with the Bush administration policy of attacking or removing unwelcome chairpersons of international bodies -- working on human rights, climate change or chemical weapons -- with which the US has disagreements. Blix, for his part, has presented a firm view of UNMOVIC's work, stating that Iraq would need to give the inspectors hard proof that its WMD had been destroyed. At the same time, he has held out the possibility that if Iraq cooperated fully, sanctions could be lifted within a year. -  http://www.zmag.org/content/Iraq/merip_graham.cfm ( MERIP Press Information Note 96, "Sanctions Renewed on Iraq," by Sarah Graham-Brown, May 14, 2002.)

Video of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter on the threat posed by Iraq: "...the real threat is zero. None." -  http://multimedia.carlton.com/ram/pilger/iraq/zero.ram



Saddam Risk a Lie, Says UN Expert

UNITED Nations weapons inspectors colluded with British secret service agents to spread disinformation about Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs as part of a campaign to justify military strikes, according to the head of the UN inspection team in Iraq.

In an interview with The Herald, Scott Ritter, who led the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) team in Iraq for seven years in the 90s, claims he helped to leak propaganda to journalists. He resigned from the post in 1998 but said his experience then suggested that recent claims that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction should be treated skeptically.

...Ritter, a former intelligence officer in the US marines, maintains there is scant evidence that Iraq is a threat.

He says claims that Iraq is re-arming come from unreliable witnesses and that factories bombed in 1998 during Operation Desert Fox had not breached UN resolutions. "Every single one of those facilities was subjected to repeated inspections and never did we detect anything to remotely suggest that these were involved in producing anything prohibited. There's nothing there. Nothing." [Published on Monday, July 8, 2002 in The Herald (Scotland) ] -  http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0708-05.htm

I hope so. The Arab people have a right to defend themselves from US imperialism.