MSNBC October 07, 2002
Eyes on Iraq: What are spy satellites seeing in Iraq?
Alan BoyleAlthough the government imagery is closely held, a private think tank has released commercial imagery showing new construction under way at an Iraqi nuclear center.
Space Imaging's photos of the Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 25 miles southeast of Baghdad, were posted to the GlobalSecurity.com Web site last month. Since then, the images - and most likely similar pictures taken by spook spacecraft - have caused a stir on both sides of the face-off. The White House sounded an alarm over the construction, while an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official brandished one of the images as he claimed that the complex was used purely for industrial and agricultural purposes.
GlobalSecurity's director, John Pike, says the satellite imagery alone generally can't determine what Saddam Hussein is up to, at Tuwaitha or elsewhere in Iraq.
"You're faced with a choice of either intrusive inspections or a friendly government to tell you what's going on there," Pike told MSNBC.com. "The satellite imagery can figure out where to look. It can't tell you what you would expect to find."
Satellite signs of construction - or even continuing activity around sites that should have been destroyed or banned from use - would serve as a pointer for inspectors or, if worse came to worst, for bombs and missiles.
Even if the Iraqis were building an underground facility, the construction work could show up on the imagery. That's why U.S. intelligence types are so concerned about Saddam's presidential palaces, Pike said - not so much because of the sprawling buildings themselves, but because of the even more widely sprawling lakes surrounding them.
"If I was trying to build an underground facility and hide it from reconnaissance, putting it under an artificial lake would be a good way of doing it," Pike said. The lakes provide a way of disposing with the water runoff created by such construction, as well as dissipating the heat from the machinery, he explained. About the best way to detect the hidden chambers would be to look for suspicious entryways from the palaces.
What about ground-penetrating radar? "If you were floating on a boat on the lake, or if you could drain the lake," that might work, Pike said. "It's not the sort of thing that's going to work at remote distances."
GlobalSecurity.org's Web site now displays a "Target Iraq Countdown" that's ticking toward T-minus-29 days. Pike explains that the countdown clock merely shows the time remaining until Election Day, since the Bush administration has said an attack wouldn't be launched before then. He speculates that the ground campaign could begin "soon thereafter," perhaps in late November or around Dec. 5, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends.
A year ago, when the war in Afghanistan began, the Pentagon struck a deal with Space Imaging for exclusive use of the company's imagery of the region - to supplement government spy photos (and, perhaps, to keep the commercial stuff out of the wrong hands). Will the Pentagon follow a similar scenario with Iraq? "We expect that something like that will happen once the war draws near," Pike said.
Copyright 2002 MSNBC
