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Fri 11 Jun, 2004 02:46 pm
I posted this but find it interesting that none of the other mainstream Media have written about it. The second post may answer why. ---BBB
UN inspectors: Saddam shipped out WMD before war and after
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Friday, June 11, 2004
The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.
The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.
The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.
UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the council on June 9 that "the only controls at the borders are for the weight of the scrap metal, and to check whether there are any explosive or radioactive materials within the scrap," Middle East Newsline reported.
"It's being exported," Perricos said after the briefing. "It's being traded out. And there is a large variety of scrap metal from very new to very old, and slowly, it seems the country is depleted of metal."
"The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks," Perricos told the council. Perricos also reported that inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.
He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East. at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. Destionations included Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey.
The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters - the latter required for the production of chemical and biological warheads.
"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax."
The UNMOVIC report said Iraqi missiles were dismantled and exported to such countries as Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, an SA-2 surface-to-air missile, one of at least 12, was discovered in a junk yard, replete with UN tags. In Jordan, UN inspectors found 20 SA-2 engines as well as components for solid-fuel for missiles.
"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Buchanan said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."
UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime. Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.
In April, International Atomic Energy Agency director-general Mohammed El Baradei said material from Iraqi nuclear facilities were being smuggled out of the country.
Personally, I think this article is a heap of bull. But I'll be looking into it.
Craven
Craven, You responded before I could post my own research on the World Tribune. I found, and you may also, find the following info interesting on who is behind the World Tribune. ---BBB
The New Yorker
THIS JUST IN DEPT. FIT TO PRINT?
Issue of 2003-09-08
Posted 2003-09-01
Aficionados of the Drudge Report may have noticed several striking headlines recently linking to stories from the World Tribune, an enterprise with a title as grand and ambitious as it is unfamiliar. One such story last week began, "U.S. intelligence suspects Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have finally been located." The apparent scoop?-of stop-the-presses significance?-was unsigned, and billed as a "special to World Tribune.com." The Times, the Journal, and the Washington Post, meanwhile, not only got beat but failed even to acknowledge the news in the days that followed. What gives?
Not everyone ignored it: Rush Limbaugh, for instance. "There's a piece in the World Tribune today?-one of the papers in the United Kingdom?-exactly as theorized on this program early on," he said on his radio show. "It's unconfirmed, but it's a story that many of the weapons of mass destruction are at present buried in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon." Fox News, catering to a similar demographic, enlisted a military analyst that evening to discuss potential ramifications?-military intervention in Lebanon??-on "The O'Reilly Factor." According to the story, the weapons were probably delivered to the Bekaa Valley, a Hezbollah stronghold, in a caravan of tractor-trailers that was spotted leaving Iraq in January, two months before the war began, as part of a multimillion- dollar storage deal between Saddam Hussein and the Syrian government.
In fact, the World Tribune is not published in the United Kingdom, nor is it, to be precise, a newspaper. It is a Web site produced, more or less as a hobby, in Falls Church, Virginia, and is dedicated to the notion, as its mission statement explains, that "there is a market for news of the world and not just news of the weird." (Nonetheless, the site includes a prominent feature, Cosmic Tribune, with an extraterrestrial focus, and it links to a Mafia journal called Gang Land News.) Its editor and publisher, Robert Morton, is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Times and a former "corporate editor" for News World Communications, the Times' owner and the publishing arm of the Unification Church, led by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. (Morton and his wife, Choon Boon, are themselves followers of the Reverend Moon.) Among the World Tribune's other recent half-ignored scoops are that Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for last month's blackout and that a North Korean defector stressed, during a meeting in July with White House officials, the need for a preëmptive military strike against Kim Jong Il.
Morton said last week via e-mail that he founded the site as an experiment, back in 1998, while serving as a media fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. "I didn't expect World Tribune.com to last for more than a few months," Morton wrote, but now, despite having no dedicated staff ("Everyone involved with World Tribune.com has a day job"), the site receives more than a million page views per month. And, unlike the Washington Times, which has lost at least a billion dollars in its twenty-one-year existence, World Tribune.com, in concert with the subscription-driven weekly intelligence briefing Geostrategy-Direct.com (a partner site), has paid for itself.
The secret of its success seems to involve well-placed informants ("Over the years I have developed an informal, international network of sources and writers I can trust," Morton said) and an emphasis on immediacy. Although Morton said, "We emphasize newspaper standards to counter the half-baked, unfiltered content on some online sites," World Tribune.com more fairly qualifies as something between a newspaper and a rumor-mongering blog. Call it "blews." In this sense, it is part of a loose network of mostly conservative sites?-WorldNetDaily, Dr. Koontz's National Security Message Board, debka File (produced by a pair of Jerusalem-based journalists thought to have moles in Israeli intelligence)?-whose dispatches sometimes serve as the journalistic equivalent of trial balloons: a story may not be based on knowable facts, but it nevertheless may occasionally turn out to be right. (Much of the time, of course, it more closely resembles a Bat Boy update in the Weekly World News.)
Take the Lebanon story. National- security buffs may have recalled hearing similar reports as far back as late December (beginning with an accusation from Ariel Sharon), and cropping up again in the spring (via debka). The story never quite stuck, however, and as of the end of last week no major newspaper had seen fit to tell it. Bill Gertz, the Washington Times' best-known reporter, is a columnist and contributing editor for Geostrategy-Direct.com and a member of the World Tribune advisory board. A few days after the Tribune's Lebanon lead, Gertz allowed that he, too, had been hearing the reports for months but hadn't written anything about it for the paper. "I've never been able to nail it down myself," he said. He would presumably have encountered similar difficulties with the story, available at Cosmic Tribune, of the increase in observed U.F.O. activity as Mars neared.
?- Ben McGrath
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