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Iraqi WMD Hunt Expected to Cost $1 Billion; Kay to Report No Discoveries Today While the CIA’s top Iraqi WMD hunter was expected to tell the U.S. Congress today that he has made no conclusive discoveries, the Bush administration is seeking an additional $600 million for the search. Combined with money already spent, the total spent on combing Iraq for WMD evidence is expected to near $1 billion, according the New York Times (see GSN, Sept. 26). The money is requested in a classified portion of the administration’s $87 billion supplemental budget request to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The WMD search is being conducted by the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,200-member Defense Department unit whose activities are directed by CIA representative David Kay, a former U.N. inspector. Kay was scheduled to testify today in closed sessions of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was not expected to report any conclusive findings (see GSN, Sept. 25). The additional money would expand the size of Kay’s team to 1,400. Some former group members have complained that the search is poorly organized and overfunded. They told the Times that search teams have spent days and weeks in Baghdad waiting to receive orders. “Even when hot tips have come in, it often takes days to mobilize a unit to visit a suspect site or talk to a suspect scientist,” one former group member said. Others have criticized the spending practices of the group, charging that the group devoted its first weeks in Iraq to erecting air-conditioned trailers, new food service facilities, new computer hardware and software, and even a sprinkler system for a lawn. “They kept unloading crates and crates of new Dell laptops,” said a Pentagon official (Risen/Miller, New York Times, Oct. 2). Iraqi Diplomat Denies Seeking Nigerien Uranium A former Iraqi diplomat, once suspected by the United States of trying to acquire uranium from Niger, has denied even knowing that Niger mined the ore, Time reported yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 11). Wissam al-Zahawie, a career Iraqi diplomat since 1955, was at the center of the now-questionable U.S. claim that Baghdad surreptiously sought to acquire uranium from Niger to provide material for Iraq’s suspected nuclear weapon program. In his January State of the Union speech, U.S. President George W. Bush claimed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from an African country, but a subsequent investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that U.S.-held diplomatic documents describing the deal were actually forgeries. In 1999, while serving as Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican, al-Zahawie was ordered to visit several African nations to encourage their leaders to visit Baghdad. Iraq’s leadership hoped such visits would weaken the travel embargo to Iraq established following the 1991 Gulf War, he said. “Frankly, I didn’t know that Niger produced uranium at all,” al-Zahawie said. Al-Zahawie toured several African countries in early 1999 and successfully persuaded Niger’s then-President Ibrahim Bare Mainassaura to travel to Iraq. Mainassaura was the only leader who accepted the invitation, but never made the trip because he was assassinated in April 1999. In January 2003, al-Zahawie was interviewed repeatedly by U.N. inspectors who probed for information about his travels and the suspicious documents, he told Time. He explained to the inspectors that Iraqi diplomatic documents were of two types, official notes that featured a government seal but were unsigned and correspondence between dignitaries that had no seal but were signed. The U.N. officials questioned al-Zahawie about a letter dated July 6, 2000 that purported to describe the uranium deal, he said. The officials told him that the letter had both a seal and signature. “I realized the forgery when they asked this,” al-Zahawie said (Hassan Fattah, Time, Oct. 1).
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