John LeBoutillier
Friday, Dec. 20, 2002

Behind all the rhetoric at the United Nations – and in London and D.C., too – there still remains one unanswered question:

What is the smoking gun that unleashes the war against Saddam Hussein?

Supposedly 'missing' documents or 'gaps' in the 12,000-page Declaration are not enough to launch a war. After all, how do you prove a negative?

What is needed is that oneirrefutable piece of evidence that incontrovertibly proves Saddam is lying about having either chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

After all, this entire crisis has been created on the pretense that Saddam has these weapons – and is lying about that fact.

OK, so how do we prove that he is lying?

1) UNMOVIC – the weapons inspectors – actually find some of these now-denied weapons. (Highly unlikely.)

2) A defector reveals a secret location and Iraqi forces deny the inspectors access. (Possible – and that would be sufficient to trigger a war.)

3) An Iraqi scientist – taken with his family out of Iraq for interrogation – reveals the truth about the WMD program. (The problem with this scenario is that Saddam isn't going to let the real scientists leave – or else he will 'change' their families and send the wrong family out, thus holding hostage the true wife and kids. Debka.com – a good source of Israeli intelligence – reports that Saddam has already executed 'talkative' scientists and locked up others and their families in 'special compounds' – just to keep those scientists whom the U.N. wants to talk to from talking. Saddam has apparently also prepared false death certificates for some scientists so that when the U.N. asks for them, they will be told, "Oh ... him? He died two years ago.")

The bottom line is simple: Saddam is in control of the information inside Iraq about where he has stashed his weapons of mass destruction. Finding them through the inspections process – or even through this Scientist Removal Project – is going to be very unlikely.

The one way to break this seemingly hopeless logjam is for American or British intelligence to reveal – if they have it – irrefutable proof of the WMD and where they are right now.

Yesterday, Hans Blix complained that so far neither D.C. nor London has provided this 'smoking gun' to the U.N.

It could be that we are waiting for the right time to reveal this war-instigating piece of evidence.

Or could it be that we don't have this information?

After all the bluster and threats by D.C. about the "threat from Baghdad" – denied, by the way, by Bush's own DCI, George Tenet – could it be that we simply do not have the proof of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction?

If we do not have it – and yet got this whole multibillion-dollar pre-war campaign activated on the claim that we knew he had these WMD – then it is an utter disgrace that we can't prove it.

If that is the case, the CIA and all our intelligence agencies, which cost the American taxpayer a whopping $60 billion per year, ought to be disgraced for what they have done – or not done.

Still, let's wait and see. Soon either Saddam or our intelligence agencies will be forced to put up or shut up.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
United Nations
War on Terrorism

Editor's note:
Saddam Hussein’s race to make a nuclear bomb