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BRIBERY BID TO CONCEAL WEAPONS THAT DIDN’T EXIST
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. None, never! We went to war based on lies! Yet even Saddam’s pals were apparently convinced he possessed WMD, leading to a clumsy bribery attempt:
Saddam Hussein’s regime offered a $2 million (£1.4 million) bribe to the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction.
Rolf Ekeus, the Swede who led the UN’s efforts to track down the weapons from 1991 to 1997, said that the offer came from Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister and deputy.
Mr Ekeus told Reuters news agency that he had passed the information to the Volcker Commission. “I told the Volcker people that Tariq [Aziz] said a couple of million was there if we report right. My answer was, ‘That is not the way we do business in Sweden.’ “
A clean report from Mr Ekeus’s inspectors would have been vital in lifting sanctions against Saddam’s regime. But the inspectors never established what had happened to the regime’s illicit weapons and never gave Iraq a clean bill of health.
Meanwhile we’re still waiting for the US to plant WMD in Iraq, as Phillip Adams promised. Adams also wrote:
Only one man was honest about WMDs in the run-up to the war. Not Bush. Not Blair. Not Howard. It was, of course, Saddam Hussein, who denied having them.
Too bad his deputy didn’t believe him.
Yeah, richard, just as was discovered about the Soviets after the fall of the wall, it’s amazing that these corrupt, incompetent, and secretive governments last as long as they do, rather than collapsng under their own weight. I guess it’s just the privilege of such societies—the boot on the throat.
A left-wing commentator Coat of Arms:
A shield, supported from one side by Moore, and the other by Adams.
The shield is divided in to four quadrants (whoops, sorry, that has right wing connotations!)- these contain the images of 1. The Pen, dripping with unidentified liquid; 2. The Sword, broken; 3. The Plastic Turkey in that unnatural pose; and 4. A large pile of Bull’s Excrement.
The Motto: I Said, Therefore It Is.Might be difficult to design blogstrop. It would need at least two bars sinister after all.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2005 03 13 at 08:16 PM • permalinkAh yes… but as Iraq was eventually shown to have no weapons of mass destruction, perhaps Tariq Aziz was merely asking the weapons inspectors to acknowledge the impossibility of Iraq’s task. Proving the non-existence of something is more difficult (so it seems) than convincing people of the existence of non-existant things.
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From everything we’ve learned about life under Saddam, his “government” was so corrupt, secretive and twisted that no one in it had authoritative knowledge of what anyone else was doing.
Scientists were buring centrifuges in their gardens, rusty old sarin shells turned up. Troops were issued NBC gear even as their government was insisting it had no NBC capability. More probably will be found, even if Saddam did order them all disposed of or moved, as local powers simply decided to play it safe and set up their own local caches.
And the odds are great that they were simply moved. Destroying nerve agents safely is a major project, as the US has discovered trying to dispose of its own stocks. Was there ever any evidence of such a project found in Iraq? Not to my knowledge. And if they were simply destroyed with the usual care for human life and the environment that Saddam showed in oh, Gulf I, the medical aftereffects would still be showing up in the Iraqi population.