Weapons of mass . . . something

OK Joe, but remember that I have already stated I think the criteria are ridiculous.

I believe that in 1998 Pakistan was not under the rule of a dictator.

I believe that martial law was not declared until 1999.

Fair 'nuff?

Ah well, it was worth a try.

I was hoping that I could slide through this one without having to mention Zia.

Anyway, now that I can't, could you tell me Joe what "great evil" he ever demonstrated? (Remember not my/your criteria)

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) - Australian intelligence relied on thin and ambiguous information for its assessment of the threat of weapons of mass destruction in pre-war Iraq, an independent report found Thursday.

"There has been a failure of intelligence on Iraq WMD. Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete," former intelligence chief Philip Flood said in a report which mirrors similar intelligence inquiries in the United States and Britain.

The report also found that Australian agencies should have known more about the "terrorist capabilities and intentions" of Asian Islamic militant group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) prior to the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian.

The al-Qaeda-linked JI has been held responsible for the Bali nightclub bombings.

"The inquiry has seen nothing to indicate that any Australian agency ... had any specific intelligence warning of the attack in Bali," Flood said in his report.

"The failure to appreciate the serious nature of the threat posed by JI was widespread outside Australia's intelligence agencies and in Indonesia itself," he said.

Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch U.S. ally, sent around 2,000 military personnel to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, citing at the time the need to prevent Iraq's weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terror groups.

Howard has since said the Iraq war was justified despite the failure to find WMD, arguing the Iraqi people were better off after the removal of Saddam Hussein.

A leading nuclear expert has pointed out a technical error in the Butler report on WMD intelligence in Iraq, and criticised the committee's finding that intelligence on Saddam Hussein seeking uranium from Africa was "credible".

The Butler report demolished the most controversial allegation in the Government's September 2002 WMD dossier - that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes - but observers were surprised that the uranium claim passed scrutiny.

American investigators have dismissed the suggestion that Iraq was seeking uranium from the west African state of Niger in a quest for nuclear weapons, because it was based on forged documents. It was also inherently implausible, they added, since Iraq had 550 tons of "yellowcake" - uranium which has undergone the first stage of processing. But the Butler committee accepted the Government's contention that it had separate intelligence, which has never been disclosed, to support the claim.

Norman Dombey, retired professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University, said yesterday that the Butler report wrongly described Iraq's stocks of uranium as unprocessed. But Professor Dombey, credited with pointing out numerous flaws in the story of an Iraqi defector whose nuclear claims were widely circulated in the US during the 1990s, was more critical of the committee's intelligence findings on the Niger issue. "The Butler report says the claim was credible because an Iraqi diplomat visited Niger in 1999, and almost three-quarters of Niger's exports were uranium. But this is irrelevant, since France controls Niger's uranium mines," he said

More than one-half of Americans -54 per cent -continue to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or a program to develop them before the United States invaded last year, a poll released Friday indicated.

Evidence of such weapons has not been found.

One-half believe Iraq was either closely linked with al-Qaida before the war (35 per cent) or was directly involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States (15 per cent).

The poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found the numbers on both questions have dropped in the face of evidence both pre-war claims may have been false.

President George W. Bush consistently equates the war against terrorism with the war in Iraq, though he has replaced his claims Iraq had weapons of mass destruction with claims the country had the "capability" of building such weapons.

Both the Sept. 11 commission and the U.S. Senate intelligence committee have raised doubts about pre-war claims by the Bush administration.

Seven in 10 in the poll said they believe the United States went to war in Iraq based on false assumptions. A similar number said the war in Iraq has given the United States a worse image in the world.

A majority, 55 per cent, said they don't think the war in Iraq will result in greater peace and stability in the Mideast. In various polls, people have been evenly split on whether the war in Iraq was the right or wrong thing to do -a sharp drop from last winter.

The poll of 733 adults was conducted by Knowledge Networks from Aug. 5-11 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The Bush administration insists that its top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. But in a withering new book, one of America's foremost nuclear weapons experts argues that the White House has been so heedless of the threat that nuclear armageddon in one or more US cities is now "more likely than not" over the next decade.

Graham Allison, a former defence official under both Republican and Democratic administrations and now a leading researcher at Harvard, describes the Bush administration as "reckless" for its failure to secure fissile materials around the world and its apparent lack of interest in preventing North Korea and Iran from becoming nuclear powers. In his book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Mr Allison lays out a series of measures to minimise the risk that al-Qa'ida or another group could either build or buy a nuclear weapon and then smuggle it into the United States.

He demonstrates that the Bush White House, for all its bullish rhetoric, has taken none of them.

"No one observing the behaviour of the US government after 9/11 would note any significant changes in activity aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring the world's most destructive technologies," he writes. At the same time, al-Qa'ida is known to have taken steps to obtain nuclear weaponry since 1992, and has publicly stated its ambition to kill four million Americans.

"On the current course," Mr Allison concludes, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable." The most likely scenario, according to security experts, is that al-Qa'ida or another group would buy or steal fissile material and then construct its own bomb, using science that has been in the public domain for 30 years. Hence the urgent need to secure the world's relatively restricted stockpiles of that fissile material - either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. However, a programme for securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, pioneered by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, has been so poorly funded that it will take another 13 years to finish at the current pace. "The incandescent and incontestable fact is that in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential nuclear weapons' worth of highly enriched uranium and plutonium were secured than in the two years before 9/11," Mr Allison told The Independent on Sunday.

A further 43 countries have varying amounts of fissile material as by-products of their civilian nuclear power industries, but as things stand the US is only willing to take this off their hands if they pay for the privilege.

Mr Allison described the Bush administration's approach to North Korea and Iran as "paralysis" - offering neither carrots nor sticks to prevent those countries becoming full nuclear weapons states. If North Korea developed a full nuclear production line - carrying with it the distinct possibility of selling parts or technology to the highest bidder - it would be "the greatest failure of American diplomacy in all our history".

A nuclear North Korea would almost certainly induce Japan and South Korea to develop their own programmes. And the Bush administration is talking about new nuclear tests and the development of so-called "mini-nukes" and atomic bunker-buster bombs.

Mr Allison ascribed many of the White House's failures to the war in Iraq, which, he says, has diverted attention and eaten up resources in a country that had neither nuclear weapons nor a nuclear weapons programme.

But he also accused the White House of a failure of imagination, an odd combination of denial and fatalism."They don't get that this is a preventable catastrophe," he said. An effective "war on nuclear terrorism", Mr Allison argued, would cost around $5bn (£2.75bn) per year. "In a current budget that devotes more than $500bn to defence and the war in Iraq," he suggested, "a penny of every dollar for what Bush calls 'our highest priority' would not be excessive."

At large, material to make 15,000 nuclear bombs

Enough weapons-grade plutonium to make more than 15,000 nuclear bombs will be vulnerable to hijack by terrorists and rogue states as the result of a disarmament initiative.

An unprecedented shipment of 300lb of the material from the United States was last night heading towards the French port of Cherbourg on two British ships. The shipment is the first instalment of 68 tons of plutonium from US and Russian weapons stockpiles to be put on to the world's roads and seas at a time when terrorists are actively seeking the material.

The move severely undermines the war on terror and casts further doubt on the rationale advanced for the Iraq war by Tony Blair at last week's Labour conference - keeping weapons of mass destruction out of terrorist hands.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly insisted that al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups will make nuclear bombs and explode them in Western cities if they can get hold of the material for them.

Last night, the Greenpeace boat Esperanza was stalking the shipment from the US nuclear weapons establishment at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Described as "the biggest ever shipment of weapons-grade plutonium" by the independent nuclear consultant John Large, it is being carried on the Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, owned by a company whose largest shareholder is British Nuclear Fuels.

BNFL refuses to disclose details of the security arrangements, but the two ships are believed to have crossed the Atlantic each armed only with a 30mm machine gun and guarded by 13 special atomic energy policemen. There were reports last night a French warship came out to escort them as they approached Cherbourg. The US governmentsaid it escorted them to the limit of its territorial waters with "a combination of Coast Guard cutters, boats, aircraft and other local law enforcement and naval assets". After the plutonium has landed, it will be taken 500 miles by road to Cadarache in Provence, to be made into nuclear fuel.

A series of studies by Mr Large, presented to the US authorities, have demonstrated gaping holes in the security arrangements. Early next year, the fuel - only slightly less vulnerable to hijack - will be transported back across the Atlantic to the Catawaba nuclear power plant in Charlotte, South Carolina.

US officials say the transatlantic trip is a "one-off", because there are plans to make the fuel in a new plant at home. But nuclear experts point out that - though this precise journey is unlikely to be repeated - it will just be the start. In September 2000, the US and Russia each agreed to eliminate 34 ton of weapons-grade plutonium and turn it into nuclear fuel. At least two tons will be taken from stockpiles each year, transported to fuel fabrication plants, turned into fuel and transported again to reactors.

Security experts are particularly worried about Russia, where plutonium is to be taken on journeys of up to 1,200 miles in its raw form, and up to 4,300 miles as fuel.

Last night, Dr Frank Barnaby, a former Aldermaston nuclear weapons specialist who became director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, called the plans "an invitation to terrorists to go nuclear".

He says a group could easily make an atomic bomb from just four-and a-half pounds of the plutonium.

No evidence of al-Qaida-Iraq link and WMD