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Iraq
The Case Against Iraq
Using intercepted telephone calls, satellite photographs, diagrams and eyewitness accounts, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out a case to the U.N. Security Council that he said shows Saddam Hussein has failed to disarm, harbors terrorists and poses an imminent danger to the world.
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Foreign ministers, from left, Soledad Alvear Valenzuela of Chile, Tang Jiaxuan of China and Dominique de Villepin of France listen to Powell’s presentation Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council.
[AP photos]
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Chemical Weapons
NOV. 10: Powell said this shows an active chemical weapons munition facility in Taji, one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. The four red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers. |
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NOV. 10: In a closeup of one of the bunkers, Powell pointed out a security facility, where guards and equipment to monitor for leaks would be. He also pointed out a decontamination vehicle, to be used in case of leaks. |
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DEC. 22: The next month, with the U.N. inspection team arriving, two of those bunkers have been sanitized. The signature vehicles are gone and the tents are gone. |
POWELL’S CASE: The bunkers are clean when the inspectors get there. The sequence of events raises the worrisome suspicion that Iraq had been tipped off. As it did throughout the 1990s, Iraq is actively using its intelligence capabilities to hide illicit activities. Powell estimated that Iraq has at least 100 metric tons and as much as 500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents, which include VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas.
Biological weapons
Powell said Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories on trucks and train cars that are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. They can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. These drawings, Powell said, are based on description from four sources: an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities; an Iraqi civil engineer who confirmed the existence of transportable facilities moving on trailers; a third source who reported in summer 2002 that Iraq had manufactured mobile production systems mounted on road trailer units and on rail cars; and a fourth source, an Iraqi major who confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories, as well as the production facilities. These factories can be concealed easily by making them look like ordinary trucks and rail cars and moving them around the country.
 POWELL’S CASE: It would be impossible for inspectors to find these trucks and rail cars. It took inspectors four years to find out that Iraq was making biological agents. And, in 1995, when Iraq finally admitted having biological weapons, it never accounted for all of them. Iraq also has never accounted for all the organic material used to make the weapons, nor has it accounted for many of the weapons filled with these agents. Iraq has admitted it has successfully weaponized anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. Hussein also tested dozens of biological agents that cause diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox.
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UN Security Council Resolution 1441 on Iraq
Paragraph 4. Decides that false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq’s obligations and will be reported to the Council for assessment.
Ties to terror
This image shows the terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaida collaborator and his al-Qaida lieutenants.
POWELL’S CASE: Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan that specialized in poisons. When the Taliban were ousted, the Zarqawi network established another poison and explosive training camp in northeastern Iraq. Al-Qaida was offered safe haven in the region by the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, which controls that corner of Iraq. Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of Ansar al-Islam. Zarqawi traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment. He stayed for two months. During this stay, nearly two dozen al-Qaida affiliates converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there, where they’ve remained for more than eight months. Since last year, members of the Zarqawi network have been apprehended in France, Britain, Spain and Italy. By the U.S. government’s last count, 116 operatives connected to this global web have been arrested.
Iraq has long had ties to the Palestine Liberation Front, and Hussein uses the Arab Liberation Front to funnel money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Ties between Iraq and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida go back to the mid 1990s. A detained al-Qaida member says Hussein was more willing to assist al-Qaida after the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole.
Al-Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. A senior al-Qaida operative who is being detained said Iraq offered chemical or biological weapons training for two al-Qaida associates beginning in December 2000. The operative also said a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases.
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Nuclear weapons
 This image shows aluminum tubes that were intercepted on their way to Iraq. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Some experts say they could be used for rocket bodies. Powell said most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Powell said Iraq has attempted to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed.
POWELL’S CASE: Based on information from Iraqi defectors, the United States knows Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear weapons program and that it attempted to build a crude nuclear weapon in 1995. Hussein has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise, and he has a bomb design. Since 1998, he has focused on acquiring the third and last component: sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion. To make the fissile material, he needs to develop an ability to enrich uranium. All the experts who have analyzed the tubes in U.S. possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use. Intelligence from multiple sources shows Iraq also is attempting to acquire magnets and high-speed balancing machines; both items can be used in a gas centrifuge program to enrich uranium. |
Death row prisoners
Powell also said sources have said Iraq has been experimenting on human beings to perfect biological or chemical weapons. “A source said that 1,600 death row prisoners were transferred in 1995 to a special unit for such experiments. An eyewitness saw prisoners tied down to beds, experiments conducted on them, blood oozing around the victim’s mouths and autopsies performed to confirm the effects on the prisoners.”
Ballistic missiles
APRIL 2002: A satellite image of the Al-Rafa’h Liquid Engine Test Facility shows a stand to test ballistic missile engines that is dramatically larger than the older test stand on the left. Powell said the test stand on the right is clearly intended for long-range missiles that can fly more than 746 miles.
POWELL’S CASE: Hussein retains a covert force of up to a few dozen Scud variant ballistic missiles with a range of 400 to 560 miles.
Iraq’s al-Samoud II and the al-Fahd ballistic missiles violate the 150-kilometer (93-mile) limit established by the Security Council. Iraq has illegally imported rocket engines, some as late as this past December, that would boost that range substantially.
Iraq has programs that are intended to produce ballistic missiles that fly 621 miles. One program is pursuing a liquid fuel missile that would be able to fly more than 746 miles. These could reach well into Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Iraq wants these missiles in order to project power, to threaten and to deliver chemical, biological and nuclear warheads.
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Intercepted communications
Among the audio tapes played by Powell, this one, he said, featured communication between two commanders in Iraq’s Second Republican Guard. It was intercepted just a few weeks ago. One commander gives an instruction to the other. Here’s a portion of the tape:
Col: Capt. Ibrahim?
Capt: I am with you, sir.
Col: Remove.
Capt: Remove (repeats instructions).
Col: The expression.
Capt: The expression.
Col: “Nerve agents.”
Capt: Nerve agents.
Col: Wherever it comes up.
Capt: Wherever it comes up.
Col: In the wireless instructions.
Capt: In the instructions.
Col: Wireless.
Capt: Wireless.
Col: Ok, buddy.
Capt: (Consider it) done, sir.
POWELL’S CASE: This conversation confirms that Iraq has chemical weapons and that the officer feared someone would use intercepted radio communications as evidence of that. Not only has Iraq lied about having weapons of mass destruction, but during the 1980s Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranians and against the Kurdish population in the north, killing as many as 20,000.
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