USA and UK lied to UNO

The list of crimes committed by the United States of America and the United Kingdom does not cease to grow. Before the criminal attack against Iraq, a sovereign nation and member of the UNO, in which war crimes and murder are being committed on a daily basis, these two countries had desperately tried to create a causus belli where none existed.

First, we were presented with Colin Powell’s “hard evidence” based on British intelligence reports, which proved to be a lifted document written twelve years previously, complete with spelling mistakes. This may have fooled the Bush administration, but no-one else.

Now it is discovered in Niger that the Bush and Blair governments had lodged a complaint with the International Atomic Energy Agency, claiming that Niger had violated international law by selling uranium to Iraq, as part of a claim that since Iraq was illegally developing its nuclear weapons programme, which Colin Powell declared to be “active” on more than one occasion, it was in material breach of UN Resolutions. What more convincing evidence that documents, presented to the IAEA, confirming that the sales had been made?

These documents were presented to the UN Agency between December 2002 and March 2003. They indicated that there had been contacts between the governments of Niamey and Baghdad to arrange for the exportation of uranium. However, there is one small problem: Mohammed El Baradei, Director of the IAEA, declared that these documents were falsified.

In December 2002, the Bush administration declared in public that two years previously, the governments of Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement in which 500 metric tonnes of concentrated uranium (yellowcake) would be sold to Iraq, while the British government supplied “Niger State Documents”, complete with the official stamp of the country and signatures of ministers.

In 1981 and 1982, Niger had exported yellowcake to Iraq for its nuclear power programme. However, at that time, it was not illegal – the UNO banned trade in nuclear materials with Iraq only in 1991.

The documents presented by the USA and UK insinuated that the trade had gone on well into the 1990s, a claim which was branded as a “lie” by the former Minister of Mines and Energy of Niger, who added that his country always cleared exports with the IAEA and anyway, no sales could have been made without the knowledge of the French company, Cogema.

After having studied the documentation presented by the US and British governments, Mohamed El-Baradei concluded that it was not authentic and for this reason “the specific allegations are unfounded”. In other words, the USA and UK falsified the documents in Washington and London and presented them to the UNO.

The line of thinking is as follows: Niger is the third largest producer of uranium after Canada and Australia. Being a Moslem country, it was obviously collaborating with Iraq. We have seen this black-and-white line of reasoning before in the Bush administration.

By “not authentic”, Mohamed El-Baradei was referring to the fact that the standard letter types had been invented, they were not the same as those used by the government in Niger, and the signatures were totally different from those of the politicians whose signatures had been forged. The “form, format, content and signatures” were all falsified.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru