SCIENTISTS: Terrorists Cannot Build Dirty Bomb from Iraqi Booty

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

(18:44)

By the CBC News Online Staff

Questions remain. Months after the coalition declared victory in the Iraq war, the U.S. has yet to reveal anything definitive to prove the allegations. Here is a look at how some of these allegations have stood the test of time.

VIENNA -- CBC
There is little danger of terrorists using stolen radioactive material from Iraq to build a so-called dirty bomb, say the country's scientists, because most of the looted material has been recovered and was low in radiation anyway.

INDEPTH: Where are Iraq's weapons?

Abbas Balasem said he didn't think Saddam Hussein revived efforts to build nuclear weapons after UN officials destroyed his initial program in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. The required resources weren't available, Balasem said.

Balasem is one of several Iraqi scientists attending a meeting of the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

His words echoed those of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, who presented a report to the agency's board of governors last week.
(More: CBC.CA)
2003 © The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Just as an aside, none of this amounts to a hill of Iranian died pistachios.

As late as March, 2003, and after, Hussein was making every attempt to show he was not disarming, including treats of attack on Turkey and Israel should the Coalition Forces choose to step foot in Iraq. He, himself, was our best disarmament source, and he was vocally refusing, daily. What is known “now” does not matter.

* Hussein chose to attack his neighbors, and he lost.

* Hussein chose arms, and he lost.

* Hussein chose to continue playing in international affairs, and he lost.

* Hussein thought the United States and Great Briton were jokes, and he lost.

* Hussein chose war, and he lost.

The CBC would have you believe history is wrong. It was all the fault of the U.S. of A.

Well, there is no rewriting here, merely a list of what was. The CBC can sit and point its crooked little fingers anywhere it likes, the West (I, at least, can recall that we were not alone) was neither instigator, nor bad guy. Believe it or not, those honors lie at the feet of the mighty Hussein, himself.

No matter how many “I told them so”’s the CBC and the like dig up (i.e., Abbas Balasem said this, or ElBaradei reported that), a matching number of sources of equal caliber can and have been raised who say otherwise. In deciding what to do, we chose to favor safety and took him out. No tears here. Hussein was an idiot, if alive remains an idiot today, and will eventually die an idiot.

Later findings are supposed to make us feel bad about liberating Iraq, but it just don’t wash. The war was his, from Desert Shield, to Enduring Freedom, and the result is a victory, for both the West, and the Middle East, but for Iraq in particular.

Believe it, or not,

Dan