Saddam Discussed Uranium Enrichment In 2000; Russia Helped Spirit WMD's Out Of Iraq?

Why is this only coming out now?

One new piece of information revealed on the tapes, released Saturday by Mr. Tierney at the Intelligence Summit, a private conference held in Arlington, is that Saddam was actively working on a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation. This is particularly worrisome because of the date of the conversation: It took place in 2000, nearly five years after Iraq's nuclear programs were thought to have stopped.

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Another speaker at the conference was John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who charged that Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were moved by Russian special forces into Syria and Lebanon. According to Mr. Shaw, former Russian intelligence boss Yevgeny Primakov came to Iraq in December 2002 in order to supervise "cleanup" operations to remove WMD production materials from the country. This operation, carried out by GRU military intelligence and Russian "spetsnaz," or special forces, troops, was designed to make it possible for critics of the war to be able to claim that Iraq had had no WMD. Mr. Shaw claims that officials in the Pentagon and the CIA, who were fearful of alienating Moscow, actively worked to discredit his efforts to bring this story to light, and that some derided it as "Israeli disinformation."

posted by Ace at 05:51 PM

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