U.N. manipulation?

Last Monday, the New York Times carried a front-page story that could change the outcome of the 2004 elections.

According to the Times, a cache of powerful explosives used to “make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons” was missing from an installation where Saddam Hussein had conducted nuclear-weapons research, a facility that “was supposed to be under American military control.”

The story was soon all over the television news. Melissa Fleming, the spokeswoman of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), went on CNN to add fuel to the spreading fire over U.S. “responsibility” for the “lost” explosives.

There was only one problem with the story: There was not a shred of evidence that it was true.

The Times quoted unnamed White House and Pentagon officials acknowledging that the explosives vanished sometime after the U.S.-led invasion last year. But named White House and Pentagon officials have said the opposite. And a senior government official told me: “It is very important the world understands that the stuff in Iraq was missing as of April 10, 2003 — the day after Baghdad fell.”

The Times story also quoted IAEA experts as saying they assumed that it was indeed Saddam who had moved the explosives — before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But, they added, it was possible the explosives were only moved to nearby fields, where the Times suggests they would be “ripe for looting.”

But how? Looters could not have stuffed 380 tons of explosives into their pockets and purses. To transport that much material would have required 38 large trucks — 10 tons per truck. Before the U.S. invasion, such truck convoys moved about Iraq freely. Once the United States was in occupation, that kind of effort could hardly have gone unnoticed.

So this is a murky story at best, and one has to wonder how the Times came to publish it on its front page, just days before the presidential election. The most likely source: Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA. Why might he want to plant such a story?

“The U.S. is trying to deny El Baradei a second term,” a high U.S. government official told me. “We have been on his case for missing the Libyan nuclear-weapons program and for weakness on the Iranian nuclear-weapons program.”

Mr. El Baradei also opposed the liberation of Iraq and objects to Washington’s tough stance regarding Iran’s attempts to develop nuclear weapons. He would like nothing better than to see President Bush defeated.

In other words, a senior U.N. official may have attempted to influence the outcome of a U.S. election by spreading false information. And major U.S. media outlets allowed themselves to be manipulated in pursuit of that goal. Call it “Bomb-gate.” Or “Al-Qaqaa-gate” — but don’t expect the elite media to seriously pursue this or any other scandal in which they themselves may be implicated.

Caught up in the political spin, the major media also have failed to ask this pertinent question: Why did Saddam have the kinds of explosives favored by terrorists — and why was he permitted to keep them? Such explosives, according to the Times, also “are used in standard nuclear-weapons design,” and were acquired by Saddam when he “embarked on a crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980s.”

Former federal terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out that U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, which imposed the terms of the 1991 Persian Gulf war ceasefire, required Iraq to “unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of… [a]ll ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers and related major parts, and repair and production facilities.”

Yet the IAEA made no attempt to force Saddam to comply with his obligations to destroy these “related major parts” of ballistic missiles.

In addition, Mr. McCarthy noted, Iraq was required “not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components” and, to the extent it had such items, present them for “urgent on-site inspection and the destruction, removal or rendering harmless as appropriate of all items specified above.”

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