WMD

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.

But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped.

In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq... “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year... at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,”

Another operation - called Mass Appeal - was revealed by the press in late 2003. This was launched in the late 1990s by MI6 and aimed to gain public support for sanctions and war against Iraq and involved planting storied int he media about Iraqi WMD. Scott Ritter was personally involved in this operation in 1997 - 1998 after being approached by MI6. He said that 'the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was', and that the operation involved the manipulation of intelligence material right up to the invasion of Iraq.

"Soon after I informed Bowman [a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counterterrorism] the FBI authorized the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," Professor Boyle said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores used in the attacks. The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens meant that there was no way of finding out which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret government biowarfare program. "Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of justice, a federal crime," said Boyle.

While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.

With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years... The same holds true for biological agent, which would have been neutralized through natural processes within three years of manufacture. Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.

[Nick] Davies describes, for example, how all was not well in the Observer newsroom in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper’s correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst... Goodman told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop but the Observer refused to publish it.