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Cheney Defends Iraqi WMD Allegations By Mike Nartker “The whole notion that somehow there’s nothing to the notion that Saddam Hussein had WMD or had developed WMD, it just strikes me as fallacious. It’s not valid,” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Now, nobody drove into Baghdad and had somebody say, ‘Hey, there’s the building over there where all of our WMDs stored’ — but that’s not the way the system worked,” he said. Acknowledging that he misspoke during an earlier Meet the Press appearance when he had said that Iraq had reconstituted nuclear weapons, Cheney yesterday offered a strong defense of the disputed White House claims that Iraq had maintained a nuclear weapons program. As proof, Cheney cited Iraq’s cadre of trained scientists, evidence that Iraq possessed usable nuclear weapons designs, and a stockpile of 500 tons of uranium stored at the Tuwaitha complex, the main site in Iraq’s former nuclear program. In addition, Cheney also referred to former Iraqi scientist Mahdi Shurkur Obeidi, who has provided the United States with components and designs for a centrifuge used to enrich uranium. “That’s physical evidence that we have got in hand today,” Cheney said. “To suggest that there is no evidence there that he [Hussein] had aspirations to acquire a nuclear weapon, I don’t think is valid,” Cheney said. The U.S. allegations that Iraq had maintained an active nuclear weapons program, as well as some of the Bush administration’s pieces of evidence of such a program, have been heavily disputed, however, according to reports. Last week, the Associated Press reported that International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei had said in a confidential report that Iraq’s nuclear weapons program would not have been able to support active development of such weapons (see GSN, Sept. 9). “In the areas of uranium acquisition, concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities,” AP quoted the report as saying. “No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq,” it said. Today, the Financial Times reported that many former Iraqi nuclear scientists have also continued to deny that their country possessed a nuclear weapons program prior to the war. “It was surprising to hear these things from the Americans that we could build a nuclear bomb in six months, while meanwhile we were sitting here scrounging for a screwdriver,” the Times quoted a scientist who formerly headed a department in Bomb Design Group Four as saying. In addition, AP reported in July that Obeidi — the same Iraqi scientist cited yesterday by Cheney — had also told the CIA that Iraq had not resurrected its nuclear weapons program since 1991 (see GSN, July 18). Cheney also defended yesterday a heavily disputed claim made prior to the war by several senior White House officials, including President George W. Bush himself, that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Africa. Cheney said a recent British inquiry had “revalidated” the claim. In July, the White House acknowledged that the claim should not have been included into Bush’s State of the Union address because evidence used to support it — documents that purported to show an attempted Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger — had been determined by the IAEA to have been fraudulent (see GSN, July 30). Last week, however, a British parliamentary committee investigating whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office had exaggerated prewar intelligence on Iraq said that British intelligence services were justified in continuing to support the claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger (see GSN, Sept. 12). Biological, Chemical Weapons In his remarks yesterday, Cheney also reiterated allegations that Iraq had maintained biological and chemical weapons programs prior to the war. Two mobile trailers recovered by U.S. forces in Iraq could have been used to “produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack,” Cheney said. The New York Times reported last month, however, that engineering experts from the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency believed that the trailers had been intended to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, as Iraqi scientists had previously claimed (see GSN, Aug. 11). With regard to chemical weapons, Cheney said he suspected that the Hussein regime had hidden such weapons within Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. “That’s not an unusual place to put it,” he said. Cheney also reiterated the White House position that Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda were connected, saying that Baghdad had provided al-Qaeda operatives with training in biological and chemical weapons. Cheney said that he was sure that Iraq had WMD capabilities prior to the war. “There is no doubt in my mind … [that] Saddam Hussein had these capabilities,” Cheney said. “This wasn’t an idea cooked up overnight by a handful of people either in the administration or the CIA,” he said. Cheney Denies Pressuring U.S. Analysts Cheney yesterday also denied reports that he had pressured CIA analysts to create analyses that supported White House positions. In June, the Washington Post quoted a senior CIA official as saying that the trips made by Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to the agency’s headquarters “sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here” (see GSN, June 5). Cheney acknowledged that he had asked “a hell of a lot of questions” of CIA analysts examining Iraqi WMD efforts, adding, “That’s my job.” He denied, however, that his questions were an attempt to pressure analysts into creating certain assessments. “I’m not willing at all at this point to buy the proposition that somehow Saddam Hussein was innocent and he had no WMD and some guy out at the CIA, because I called him, cooked up a report saying he did,” Cheney said. “That’s crazy. That makes no sense. It bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever,” he added.
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