More evidence is coming to light that maybe, just MAYBE, Saddam was in violation of the UN sanctions after all. This is on top of earlier reports that engines with increased radiation counts have been found recently in scrap yards in Jordan.
Of course, some people have repeated "BOOOOOOOSH LIEEEEED!!" so many times, I'm sure this won't make an impression on them.
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http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news...U&refer=europe
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Iraqi Missile Engines Found in Netherlands, UN Inspectors Say
June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Two engines from Iraqi surface-to-air missiles, including one from an Al Samoud 2 missile banned by the United Nations, have turned up in a scrap yard in the Netherlands, according to UN arms inspectors.
Representatives of the unidentified scrap yard said at least five and as many as 12 similar engines were sent to the Rotterdam location earlier this year, and more may have passed through, according to a report dated May 28 from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
Unmovic, which ran inspections in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion, said some of the materials may have been taken out of Iraq by looters and sold as scrap. Satellite photos show Iraqi sites subject to international monitoring that have been cleaned out or destroyed, according to the report.
The UN inspectors said the discovery shows the difficulty of accounting for how many banned missiles the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed before he was overthrown in a U.S.-led invasion last year. The U.S.'s Iraq Survey Group is hunting for banned arms in Iraq in the absence of the UN team.
Workers at the scrap yard in the Dutch port said the site received other items made of stainless steel and other metals bearing the inscription ``Iraq'' or ``Baghdad'' shipped beginning in November 2003. Some of the items analyzed by the Unmovic team were composed of inconel and titanium, materials that had both civilian and military uses.
Inconel is a corrosion-resistant alloy containing nickel, chromium and iron, according to the Web site of the U.S. government's Argonne National Laboratory.
The yard deals in ``high-quality stainless steel,'' and the company involved is cooperating with the investigation, the UN report said.
Radiation Probed
The engines came to light after a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited the yard to look into what the UN report described as ``increased radiation readings.'' The report doesn't elaborate on the radiation.
The serial number on one missile examined in Rotterdam was found in a UN database, indicating it came from a missile that had been tagged by inspectors and not declared as having been fired.
``A lot of stuff was looted from within the country,'' John Isaacs, the senior policy director at the Washington-based Center for Arms Control, said in an interview. At least some of the ordnance used to attack the U.S.-led coalition or make homemade roadside bombs came from Iraqi stockpiles, he said.
If militants seized a missile with a range of even a few hundred miles, a city could be attacked without the contraband even having to be smuggled into the area, according to Isaacs.
U.S. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq under the justification that Hussein's regime defied the demands of the UN Security Council for 12 years by refusing to disarm and allow complete and unobstructed arms inspections. Bush asserted that the possibility that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons could be handed off to international terrorists such as al-Qaeda posed too grave a threat to overlook.
While no banned arms caches have yet been found, the Bush administration said it is too early to call off the search.