By Scott Ritter
"On March 10, The Washington Post published an article that caught my eye. Under a headline proclaiming “Saddam Hussein weighed nuclear ‘package deal’ in 1990, documents show,” Joby Warrick, the author of the article, declared in his opening paragraph, “As troops massed on his border near the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein weighed the purchase of a $150 million nuclear ‘package’ deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to supervise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former U.N. weapons inspector.”
The source of the documents was David Albright, a nonproliferation specialist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization that Albright himself founded. Albright talked to The Washington Post about these “newly uncovered” documents as part of a publicity campaign for the release of his new book, “Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies.” The Washington Post article was picked up by newspapers and other media outlets around the world, and has been cited by the Pakistani government as one of the reasons behind its recent decision to open a new investigation into the nuclear proliferation dealings of A.Q. Khan, who is also accused of selling nuclear weapons plans and related technology to Iran and Libya.
There is only one problem with The Washington Post story—it isn’t true. The fact is, there never was any such “package deal” worthy of the name, and, in any event, a Pakistani “deal” for a potential nuclear weapon was never “weighed” by Saddam Hussein or any other Iraqi official of note......
...The danger of The Washington Post’s fanciful reinterpretation of history, whether dealing with Iraq or Iran, is that, when picked up and disseminated by the mainstream media, it may shape public sentiment in a manner that will be detrimental to Obama’s disarmament vision. Americans need to start spending more time looking at the sources from which they draw their information. The stakes cannot get much higher, and the consequences of failure are grave."
"On March 10, The Washington Post published an article that caught my eye. Under a headline proclaiming “Saddam Hussein weighed nuclear ‘package deal’ in 1990, documents show,” Joby Warrick, the author of the article, declared in his opening paragraph, “As troops massed on his border near the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein weighed the purchase of a $150 million nuclear ‘package’ deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to supervise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former U.N. weapons inspector.”
The source of the documents was David Albright, a nonproliferation specialist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization that Albright himself founded. Albright talked to The Washington Post about these “newly uncovered” documents as part of a publicity campaign for the release of his new book, “Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies.” The Washington Post article was picked up by newspapers and other media outlets around the world, and has been cited by the Pakistani government as one of the reasons behind its recent decision to open a new investigation into the nuclear proliferation dealings of A.Q. Khan, who is also accused of selling nuclear weapons plans and related technology to Iran and Libya.
There is only one problem with The Washington Post story—it isn’t true. The fact is, there never was any such “package deal” worthy of the name, and, in any event, a Pakistani “deal” for a potential nuclear weapon was never “weighed” by Saddam Hussein or any other Iraqi official of note......
...The danger of The Washington Post’s fanciful reinterpretation of history, whether dealing with Iraq or Iran, is that, when picked up and disseminated by the mainstream media, it may shape public sentiment in a manner that will be detrimental to Obama’s disarmament vision. Americans need to start spending more time looking at the sources from which they draw their information. The stakes cannot get much higher, and the consequences of failure are grave."
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