Three U.S. officials told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that an Iraqi scientist who was part of what Saddam called his “nuclear mujahadeen” had led intelligence officials to a barrel in the back yard of his home in Baghdad, where they found plans for a gas centrifuge and components of a uranium enrichment system.
The Associated Press, citing a U.S. intelligence official, identified the scientist later as Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed Iraq’s program to make centrifuges that would enrich uranium for nuclear weapons before the 1991 Gulf War. NBC’s sources said the plans dated back to the end of the Gulf War, when Saddam was already widely known to be seeking such weapons, and came as no great surprise.
Richard Butler, the United Nations’ former chief weapons inspector, told MSNBC TV’s Lester Holt that he was “absolutely unsurprised” by the report. “We have known of [Saddam’s previous plans] for a decade,” he said.
Butler said that the discovery of components of a uranium enrichment system suggested that Iraq was far from production of actual weapons. The need for an enrichment system established that “Iraq does not have adequate sources of natural uranium,” he said. “... It has to be, above all, enriched to get weapons grade.”
“This all adds up and makes sense,” Butler said.
So the imminent threat would be where? This stuff is what, twelve years old?
MORE: From Joby Warrick of WaPo:
Mahdi Obeidi, who headed Iraq's uranium enrichment program in the late 1980s and early 1990s, turned over the documents to U.S. officials in Baghdad voluntarily and is now assisting the investigation of Iraq's former weapons program, according to officials of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research group that advised the scientist in his decision to surrender the materials to the U.S. government.
Obeidi supplied U.S. officials with several components of a gas centrifuge, a machine used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, along with design plans for the machines, the institute's assistant director, Corey Hinderstein, said yesterday. The scientist, who contacted the group in late April, said he buried the materials in his yard in 1991 under orders from Hussein's son, Qusay.
"If the order was given, these documents and materials could be used to restart the program," Hinderstein said. She added: "Obeidi did not receive that order."
Despite assertions by Bush administration officials before the war that Iraq was rebuilding a nuclear program, U.S. officials have so far found no evidence that Hussein had reconstituted the advanced nuclear weapons program he developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
So this is the best Obedi has?!