[THS] ElBaradei Suggests Iraq War Crime Probe of Bush Administration

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27945.htm

Former IAEA Head Suggests Iraq War Crime Probe of Bush Administration

Nobel-winning Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei accuses U.S. leaders of grotesque
distortion in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion and chides Washington for
reluctant approach to talks with Iran.

By The Associated Press

April 22, 2011 "AP" -- The former chief United Nations nuclear inspector Mohamed
ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face
international criminal investigation for the shame of a needless war in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning
Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of grotesque distortion in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq
invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq
possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and
other arms inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that deliberate deception was not limited to small countries
ruled by ruthless dictators, ElBaradei writes in The Age of Deception, being published
Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his
321-page account of two decades of tedious, wrenching nuclear diplomacy with a
plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian
nuclear ambitions.

"All parties must come to the negotiating table," writes ElBaradei, who won the Nobel
Peace Prize jointly with the IAEA in 2005. He repeatedly chides Washington for
reluctant or hardline approaches to negotiations with Tehran and Pyongyang.

He is harshest in addressing the Bush administration's 2002-2003 drive for war with
Iraq, when ElBaradei and Hans Blix led teams of UN inspectors looking for signs
Saddam Hussein's government had revived nuclear, chemical or biological weapons
programs.

He tells of an October 2002 meeting he and Blix had with Secretary of State Colin
Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others, at which the
Americans sought to convert the UN mission into a cover for what would be, in
essence, a United States-directed inspection process.

The UN officials resisted, and their teams went on to conduct some 700 inspections of
scores of potential weapons sites in Iraq, finding no evidence to support the U.S.
claims of weapons of mass destruction.

In his own memoir, published last November, Bush still insisted it was right to invade
to remove a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD. But the ex-president also wrote of a
sickening feeling when no arms turned up after the invasion, and blamed an
intelligence failure for the baseless claim, a reference to a 2002 U.S. intelligence
assessment contending WMD were being built.

But that assessment itself offered no concrete evidence, and Bush and his aides have
never explained why the U.S. position was not changed as on-the-ground UN
findings came in before the invasion.

ElBaradei cites examples, including the conclusion by his inspectors inside Iraq that
certain aluminum tubes were designed for artillery rockets, not for uranium
enrichment equipment to build nuclear bombs, as Washington asserted.

The IAEA chief reported this conclusion to the UN Security Council on Jan. 27, 2003,
anhxet on the next day Bush - in a remarkable response - delivered a State of the
Union address in which he repeated the unfounded claim about aluminum tubes,
ElBaradei notes.

Similar contradictions of expert findings occurred with the claim, based on a forgery,
that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger, and an Iraqi exile's fabrication that mobile
labs were producing biological weapons.

I was aghast at what I was witnessing, ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude
before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls aggression where there was no
imminent threat, a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi civilians were killed.

In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the
war was illegal. And, if so, should not the International Criminal Court investigate
whether this constitutes a 'war crime' and determine who is accountable?

Formidable political and legal barriers would seem to rule out such an investigation.
But ElBaradei, citing the war-crimes prosecution of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, sees
double standards that should end.

Do we, as a community of nations, have the wisdom and courage to take the
corrective measures needed, to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again?
he asks.