CHASING THE IRAQI NUCLEAR HOAX
One of many troubling features of the war in Iraq is the fact
that some of the evidence proferred by the United States
government to justify the war has proved to be fabricated and
false.
Documents purporting to show that Iraq sought to purchase
uranium from Niger are now known to be forgeries, raising
questions about the good faith of the Bush Administration,
which cited the claim in the State of the Union address, the
competence of U.S. intelligence agencies and, not least, the
identity and motives of the forgers.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) recently sent an eight page letter to
White House in an attempt to probe the meaning of this episode.
"It has become incontrovertibly clear that a key piece of
evidence you and other Administration officials have cited
regarding Iraq's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons is a hoax,"
wrote Rep. Waxman. "This is a breach of the highest order, and
the American people are entitled to know how it happened."
See Rep. Waxman's March 17 letter here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/03/waxman.pdf
Jack Shafer wrote a series of items on media coverage and
non-
coverage of the matter in Slate. See his "Follow That
Story: The Nuclear Whodunit":
http://slate.msn.com/id/2080583
Seymour Hersh did his thing in the New Yorker this week.
See
"Who Lied to Whom?" here:
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1
NORTH KOREA AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS
"If the United States discards its hostile policy against the
DPRK [North Korea] and discontinues making nuclear threats, we
will be ready to prove, through a separate verification between
the DPRK and the United States, that we will not make nuclear
weapons."
That's what North Korea said in a lengthy statement explaining
its decision to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation
Treaty.
The statement, which is coherent and rational and generally free
of cartoonish vitriol, suggests that it might be possible to
find a diplomatic solution to the problems posed by the North
Korean nuclear program.
See the January 21 statement, newly translated by the Foreign
Broadcast Information Service, here:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/nuke/dprk012203.html
For related background, see "North Korea's Nuclear
Weapons
Program" by Larry A. Niksch, Congressional Research Service,
updated March 17:
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/crs/IB91141.pdf
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
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