The Evening Standard (London) September 9, 2002
My guided tour of Iraq's 'innocent' atomic plant
 Tuwaitha Nuclear Center, Iraq |
By Sam Kiley
IRAQ today gave the media access to its largest known nuclear plant, claiming it would prove that Britain and the US have been 'lying' over allegations that Saddam Hussein has been secretly building an atomic bomb. The visit was inconclusive.
Using a copy of a satellite image from globalsecurity.org, a web-based monitoring group, which identified five compounds inside the Tuwaitha complex - 25 miles south-east of Baghdad - as being 'dedicated clandestine facilities', the Iraqi government set out to show that the new buildings were entirely innocent.
The head of a UN atomic weapons team said on Friday that satellite photos show new construction at several sites linked to Saddam's past nuclear efforts. And a US intelligence official said that Iraq has recently stepped up attempts to import industrial equipment that could be used to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Today journalists untrained in the science of weapons' inspection were taken to the sites identified on the satellite photographs. These included an environmental research laboratory, a pharmaceutical research and production plant, design and engineering offices, and some physics labs.
There was no apparent evidence of the huge amount of pipes, cooling systems, storage tanks and other cauldrons dedicated to the production of nuclear weapons - aside from the three reactor plants which were destroyed by Israel in 1981, the Allies a decade later, and again in 1998. In the absence of weapons inspectors, it was perhaps fitting that the last buildings shown by the satellite image as being a 'clandestine facility' were two air-conditioned structures about double the size of shipping containers. Inside, mushroom were being grown in the dark on horse manure.
Tuwaitha has a less innocent past. It was at the centre of Saddam's efforts to build a nuclear device, but it has been regularly inspected, the last time in January, by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Today the only nuclear activity that could be seen was a storage plant for contaminated water and a bunker housing 168 tons of uranium oxide which is under the IAEA's supervision.
The director of the facility, Dr Fa'iz Berkder, said: 'We don't want the UN inspectors back here because they do not tell the truth. So we have opened Tuwaitha to the international media because you will tell the world the truth - that there is no nuclear programme here, or anywhere else in Iraq.'
The Russian-built Tamuz I and French-built Tamuz II reactors as well as the Italian-built Tamuz 14 reactors are in ruins. Most of their fuel cells were moved to Russia in '1992 or 1993', Iraqi officials said. The vast pipes and silos were blasted full of holes. But the compound remains heavily guarded and surrounded by earth ramparts at least 100 feet high.
Yassin Ramadan Taha, the Iraqi vice president, insisted yesterday: 'There is no such thing (as a nuclear programme). They are telling lies and lies to make others believe them.'
But the propaganda war continues with a pledge from George Bush to reveal to the UN Security Council this week the extent of the threat posed by Saddam and more allegations that Saddam met Osama bin Laden twice - and tried to have his own son, Uday, killed.
No links between Bin Laden and Saddam have been proved although the Iraqi leader has backed terrorist groups in the past, among them Abu Nidal's organisation. But Iraqi exiles, many of them seeking safe haven in America, have alleged close links between the Saudi-born terrorist and Saddam.
Today a woman who claims to have been a long-time mistress of the Iraqi leader told ABC News that the two men met twice. Parisoula Lampsos said she saw Bin Laden in one of Saddam's palaces in the late 1980s. She said Saddam's son, Uday, told her Saddam also met Bin Laden in 1996.
Copyright 2002 Copyright 2002 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
