Saddam's WMD Found - in NYC

Is America safer, as Bush says? You decide.

Exhibit A: Chemical weapon scare causes U.N. evacuation

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- A U.N. office was evacuated after workers found vials that may have contained the poison gas phosgene Thursday.

U.N. archivists unexpectedly turned up samples of material from an Iraqi chemical weapons plant in weapons inspectors' files dating back to the 1990s, but the substance is not believed to pose any immediate danger, U.N. officials said Thursday.

The material was taken from al-Muthanna chemical weapons plant north of Baghdad. The samples are sealed and have been there since 1996, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

Whoops.

Exhibit B: Audit finds U.S. nuclear weapons parts misplaced

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some facilities that handle the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile misplaced classified bomb components under their care, according to an Energy Department audit.

The department's Inspector General also found there was confusion at the facilities over who was responsible for keeping track of weapons parts and recommended changes in how to better safeguard the parts.

John Broehm, a spokesman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration that oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, said his agency disagreed with the recommendations.

He said the parts, which he declined to identify, were later found.

Right. What's the point of agreeing with recommendations to tighten things up? Heckuva job there, Mr Broehm. It's not like they've had that many security concerns there, after all.

Exhibit C: Meanwhile, these actual acts of domestic terrorism are getting very little press, FBI Investigates String of Store Threats. If this was happening in my country, I think I'd like to know about it.

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) -- Large grocery and discount stores across the country have been targeted by a caller who threatens to blow up shoppers and workers with a bomb if employees fail to wire money to an account overseas, authorities said.

Frightened workers have wired thousands of dollars - and in one case took off their clothes - to placate a caller who said he was watching them but may have been thousands of miles away. The FBI and police said Wednesday they are investigating similar bomb threats at more than 15 stores in at least 11 states - all in the past week.

"At this point, there's enough similarities that we think it's potentially one person or one group," FBI spokesman Rich Kolko said from Washington.

No one has been arrested, no bombs have been found, and no one has been hurt, though the calls have triggered store evacuations and prompted lengthy sweeps by police and bomb squads.
[...]
Separately, the FBI is looking into bomb threats on college campuses, including two in Ohio - the University of Akron and Kenyon College. No explosive devices have been found. Law enforcement officials said there was no evidence at this time linking the college bomb threats with those at grocery and discount stores.

Kenyon, in Gambier in central Ohio, received six separate bomb threats in a general admissions e-mail account between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. Wednesday, college spokesman Shawn Presley said. Local and federal authorities determined the threats to be a hoax and the school was not evacuated as officials swept buildings searching for the bomb, he said.

Of course, the lesson in all of this is obviously that Iran should be your number one security concern because Bush says so. Just ignore all of the rest of this trivial stuff. Nothing to see there, folks.

Oh, and speaking of Iran: Iran atom work at slow pace and not significant: IAEA.

Priorities people. Priorities.
 

Guess what? Iraq Didn't Have WMD

Yes, I know that may come as a big surprise to half of Americans polled last year (yes - half), but the US and Russian governments have finally decided to state the obvious:

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.S. and Russia have agreed to dismantle the U.N. agency that searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and affirm that Saddam Hussein's government had no such arms at the time of the American invasion in March 2003.

The Security Council will adopt a resolution the last week in June to close the U.N. Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission, created in 1999 to search Iraq for biological and chemical weapons, Belgian and British diplomats said. The measure will also end the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency's mandate to look for nuclear arms in Iraq.

U.N. inspectors found no banned weapons before or since the invasion.

Feisal al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy ambassador to the U.N., said his country is "still dealing with the residue of having been a pariah state" and called the resolution a "huge symbolic step that will show we are taking steps forward to be reintegrated in the community of nations."

He said adopting the U.S.-drafted resolution would be a prelude to lifting all U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq during Saddam's reign.

So, despite the fact that the US illegally invaded Iraq and has had control of it for years now while democratically-held elections took place, the country is still under sanctions? Sanctions, by the way, have a habit of causing humanitarian nightmares.

And not only that:

Iraq has complained about paying $50 million since the invasion to maintain the agency, known as UNMOVIC. The agency, which withdrew the inspectors before the war, employs 34 people and prepares quarterly reports to the Security Council.

The Iraqi people have been ripped off in so many ways by the Bush administration's lies, with the biggest theft (besides the hundreds of thousands of lives lost) coming down the pike via the proposed oil law, that the entire disaster is practically beyond comprehension. Then again, I'm not an imperialistic warmonger raking in the profits so maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time seeing this as anything but one huge war crime.
 

Gaddafi, Iran, The US and Nuclear Power

One longstanding criticism of Iran's pursuit of nuclear energy from the US government has been this talking point stressed by the state department back in 2004:

Speaking to reporters, spokesman Richard Boucher remarked:

"We don't see the economic or any other rationale for a country like Iran to try to generate power with nuclear energy, given that... they flare off way more gas every year than they could get energy from nuclear power plants of the kind that they're talking about."

The Bush administration is now doing everything it possibly can at the UN to stop Iran's program over fears that it may be used to produce nuclear weapons. (The IAEA scolded the Bush administration back in September 2006 saying part of its case against Iran is "outrageous and dishonest.")

Now, considering that the state department apparently believes that countries with vast oil resources don't really need nuclear power, what are we to make of this news?

TRIPOLI – The United States will help Libya generate nuclear electricity, the North African country said on Monday, in an announcement appearing to herald a further improvement in ties with the West.

There was no immediate comment from Washington, which has been repairing ties with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi since he began a series of moves in 2003 aimed at ending decades of international isolation for his oil and gas exporting country.

Libya's official Jana news agency said an agreement between the two countries would be signed shortly.

It would include building a nuclear power plant, helping develop water desalination capacity, joint research and technical projects and training Libyan technicians in the United States.
[...]
Fears over finite oil and gas supplies and climate change have pushed nuclear power into the limelight as a way of producing energy and cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, blamed for global warming.

Libya has proven oil reserves of 39 billion barrels, enough for 60 years at current production rates. Its largely unexploited gas reserves are estimated at 53 trillion cubic feet.

Gaddafi, who Ronald Reagan once called "the mad dog of the Middle East" back in the day when he was busy supporting terrorists, has undergone an apparent conversion in his advancing years so he's now on the US's "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" list.

But, wait a minute, as recently as 2005 it was reported that Libya was allegedly getting uranium hexafluoride from North Korea after Gaddafi said he'd given up his weapons programs:

The nuclear material that North Korea may have exported to Libya was uranium hexafluoride. This is not fissile material but can be enriched into weapons-grade material if it is fed into nuclear centrifuges. Thus, it is considered material that could eventually be used in weapons, making the discovery of the sale disturbing to U.S. officials.

No big deal though, since the US government always acts based on its own interests in the end:

CAIRO, May 15 [2006] -- The normalization of U.S.-Libya relations is a natural marriage of an American administration desperate for friends and oil in the Middle East and a government that needs to open its economy to the outside world, Arab and exiled Libyan observers said Monday.

The announcement was called proof that promotion of democracy is no longer a top priority of the Bush administration, which is grappling to hold Iraq together and has turned attention toward building alliances against a hostile Iran over its nuclear program. Libya has been ruled by Moammar Gaddafi since he seized power in 1969.
[...]
The United States lifted its economic embargo against Libya in 2004, and since then, at least six U.S. oil companies have resumed drilling and exploration that had been suspended in 1986. Libya possesses the world's eighth-largest oil reserves, but the U.S. embargo had driven down production by keeping new equipment and technology out of the country.

Since Gaddafi is cooperating with the IAEA inspections and has surrendered Libya's components (the power of which the Bush administration vastly overestimated in 2004) one question still remains: why is there a double standard in dealing with Iran?

March 5, 2007

Dr. ElBaradei said that to date in Iran, the Agency had "not seen any diversion of nuclear materials... nor the capacity to produce weapons usable materials". He said that these were also "important elements in assessing the situation, assessing the risk, and understanding how to address the Iranian question".

The Director General reiterated his call for a "timeout" regarding the Iranian nuclear issue, saying he hoped talks could resume on the matter. "That´s the only way in my view to achieve a durable solution to the issue."

There hasn't been a "time out" of course. The US government is forcefully seeking a second UN security council resolution to impose more sanctions on Iran, which has become a very hard sell, and Iran's president is now saying that he wants to address the UN security council about his program.

Meanwhile, the official Bush administration position remains a refusal to talk to Ahmadinejad unless he stops enriching uranium while it continues an embargo on Iran's banks as well. Iran's government considers that tactic as "harassment" while Hans Blix called in February for those who are aggressively pushing for more sanctions to stop "humiliating" Iran by demanding that it cease its programs before it will be dealt with:

His warning came as top members of the UN Security Council met in London to consider additional sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, a key nuclear process.

He said the package of economic and political incentives put forward in June 2006 by the US and key European countries, which was later endorsed by the council, did not mention the key issue of security guarantees for Iran or adequately address the possibility of US diplomatic recognition if Tehran renounces enrichment.

"The first incentive, I think, is to sit down with them in a direct talk rather than saying to them 'you do this, thereafter we will sit down at a table and tell you what you get for it'," Mr Blix said.

"That's getting away from a humiliating neo-colonial attitude to a more normal (one). People have their own pride whether you like them or don't," he told a media briefing ahead of a conference on Weapons Threats and International Security organised by a Washington-based research institute on domestic and international challenges.
[...]
"This is in a way like telling a child, first you will behave and thereafter you will be given your rewards," he said.

"And this, I think, is humiliating. The Iranians have resisted all the time saying, no, we are willing to talk, we are willing to talk about the suspension of enrichment, but we are not for suspension before the talks. I would be surprised if a poker player would toss away his trump card before he sits down at the table. Who does that?" he asked.

The stalemate continues.

They talked to Gaddafi. Why won't they talk to Ahmadinejad?

Related:
Military action against Iran would backfire on Israel, report warns
Libyan Nuclear Weapons
Flashback to 2004: IAEA Leader's Phone Tapped