VIENNA, 4 October 2003 — UN weapons experts yesterday trashed US claims that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been planning to revive its atomic weapons program until the US invasion in March. Speaking to Reuters, an expert close to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said David Kay’s report was largely based on “statements and opinions by scientists and officials with no apparent supporting evidence.”
Kay, head of the US-led team which has been searching for evidence of Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in postwar Iraq, said Thursday his team had found no stocks of such arms. But he said there was “evidence of Saddam’s continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons.”
“The testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons,” Kay said of the interim report his team supplied to the US Congress.
“Saddam Hussein remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons.”
The allegation that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs after United Nations inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 was the main justification for the US-led war to disarm Iraq.
But after returning to Iraq late in 2002 to conduct four months of inspections in the buildup to the war, the IAEA said it had found no evidence that Saddam had revived his clandestine atomic weapons program, a program the IAEA detected in 1991 and says it had dismantled by 1995.
“The (Kay) report is filled with the use of the words ‘belief’ and ‘may’ and ‘could have’ and these sorts of things,” the nuclear expert told Reuters. “This is not how the IAEA operates,” said the expert, who supported the agency’s prewar inspections in Iraq. “They would not have given credence to statements by individuals without having corroborating evidence to support their allegations. The IAEA only states what it can verify.”
The source also questioned Kay’s reliance on testimony from senior Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and high-level Baath Party official Khalid Ibrahim Sa’id, who was killed at a Baghdad roadblock by the occupation forces on April 8.
In his statement to US lawmakers, presented behind closed doors, Kay said: “Sa’id began several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development.”
Calling that limited allegation “pretty pathetic”, the nuclear expert close to the IAEA added that since Sa’id could no longer be questioned, his testimony should be treated with more than a grain of salt.
Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told BBC radio that the United Nations Charter allowed self-defense against an attack, but that the US-led coalition had failed to prove Iraq posed a “manifest and imminent” threat — the UN criteria for military action.
“One (criterion) is that there should be a manifest threat,” Blix told the BBC. “The intelligence was not so strong in reality that it could be said to be manifest.
“And the second one would be the imminence of it. If they can develop weapons of mass destruction in five years or 10 years, well that certainly is not imminent.”
In Washington, a leading congressional critic, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said the results of the search to date demonstrated no imminent threat existed “and there was time for more diplomatic effort before we went to war.”
Pelosi,, who met with Kay in the Capitol building, emerged to tell reporters that “it was clear to me that there was no imminence of a threat for weapons of mass destruction,” as the White House had claimed. She said the discoveries made so far are evidence of Iraq’s aspiration for a weapons program, but added there was a difference between that and achieving the ability to deploy such weapons. Pelosi, who voted against last year’s authorization of the use of force in Iraq, said the classified intelligence she saw at the time did not support the claim of an imminent threat of the banned weapons.
