Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[wstera2]

....The CIA has in its hands the critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology -- parts needed to develop a bomb program -- that were dug up in a back yard in Baghdad....

....The parts, with accompanying plans, were unearthed by Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi who had hidden them under a rose bush in his garden 12 years ago under orders from Qusay Hussein and Saddam Hussein's then son-in-law, Hussein Kamel....

....it was evidence the Iraqis concealed plans to reconstitute their nuclear program as soon as the world was no longer looking....

....Obeidi told CNN the parts of a gas centrifuge system for enriching uranium were part of a highly sophisticated system he was ordered to hide to be ready to rebuild the bomb program....

....Obeidi also said he was not the only scientist ordered to hide that type of equipment....

...."It begins to tell us how huge our job is," Kay said. "Remember, his material was buried in a barrel behind his house in a rose garden.

"There's no way that that would have been discovered by normal international inspections. I couldn't have done it. My successors couldn't have done it." ....

....Experts said the documents and pieces Obeidi gave the United States were the critical information and parts to restart a nuclear weapons program, and would have saved Saddam's regime several years and as much as hundreds of millions of dollars for research.

David Albright, who was a U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, said inspectors "understood that Iraq probably hid centrifuge documents, may have had components, and so it is very important that those items be found."

"What it is that Obeidi was ordered to keep was all the information and some centrifuge components, so that if he was given the order, he could restart the centrifuge program," said Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

"In a sense, the program was in hibernation. He was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program, and he never got the order. So in that sense it doesn't show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program. And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991."

He also said other Iraqi scientists were watching to see if he was safe after he cooperated with the U.S. government.

Now that he and his family are safely out of Iraq, Obeidi said he believes other scientists would come forward with other components of Iraq's weapons program.

Before the Iraq war, U.S. officials said Iraq tried to purchase aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges that enrich uranium.

In his March 7 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, however, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said there was no evidence "Iraq intended to use these 81-millimeter tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets." ....

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/25/sprj.irq.centrifuge/index.html