Saddam never asked for Nukes to be Reconstituted: Top Iraqi Scientist
AP reports that Jafar Dhia Jafar, father of Iraq’s nuclear program, is denying that Saddam ordered the program started back up after 1991.
Contrast this report with Vice President Dick Cheney’s statement on 3/16/03, “We believe Saddam has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” Now, what Cheney said is clearly false. He said it on the even of war, as a way of whipping up war fever. In a nation with political accountability, I think it is sufficiently serious enough an error that he ought to just resign. When a high political leader makes claims of this magnitude, which had the effect of grossly misleading Congress and the American people (and of frankly scaring them into doing things they might otherwise not have done), it is wrong for him to remain in office after that.
Lest anyone think that it is Jafar’s word against Cheney, the Center for American Democracy notes that ‘ Voice of America reported on 9/16/03 that, a senior official in Iraq’s new science ministry says the country never revived its nuclear program after U.N. inspectors dismantled it in the 1990’s. The scientist, who is an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad, says Iraqi scientists had no way to re-start the program because the inspectors took away all the necessary resources. ‘