Quoted:
I wonder how many other countries are involved ?

So far we have the French and now the Germans
supporting our enemy.

"Iraq's Suppliers -

 Iraq has built these capabilities almost entirely with imports. Before the Gulf War, Western companies sold Iraq turbopumps and rocket nozzles for extended-range Scud missiles, sold special furnaces and presses capable of shaping nuclear weapon components, and built turn-key plants for manufacturing poison gas agents. Without this help, Iraq's weapon programs could not have achieved anything near the success they enjoyed when the Gulf War began.

 These procurement efforts continued during the 1990s, despite the prohibitions of the U.N. embargo. In 1999, our organization revealed that Iraq had imported a half dozen machines called "lithotripters" (which pulverize kidney stones inside the body without surgery) under the guise of humanitarian supplies.

Each machine, however, required a high-precision electronic switch that had a second use: it could trigger an atomic bomb. Iraq wanted to buy 120 extra switches as "spare parts." Iraq placed the order with the German electronics firm Siemens, which supplied the machines but forwarded the order for the extra switches to its supplier, Thomson-C.S.F., a French military-electronics company.

It is uncertain whether the French government barred the sale. Stephen Cooney, a Siemens spokesman, claimed that Siemens shipped only eight switches, one in each machine and two spares. Sources at the United Nations and the State Department, however, believe that the number supplied is higher. It only takes one switch to detonate Iraq's latest bomb design.

 In March 2001, our organization disclosed that the Chinese company Huawei Technologies, recently caught supplying fiber optic technology to Iraq's air defenses, had previously imported a large amount of sensitive U.S. equipment, and had an important license application pending to import more from Motorola. In fact, Motorola proposed to sell routing and switching technology that would have been ideal for improving an air defense network. The technology allows communications to be shuttled quickly across multiple transmission lines, increasing efficiency and immunizing the network from air attack.

 Iraq also shopped for military items throughout the 1990s, despite U.N. sanctions. In the article in Commentary, Ms. Motz and I showed that Iraq's procurement efforts were focused mainly in former eastern bloc countries. We based the article on a series of U.N. reports in which the U.N. inspectors detailed what they knew about Iraq's foreign suppliers. The reports revealed that in violation of the U.N. embargo, Iraq had continued to "import goods . . . from at least . . . twenty different countries" and that Iraq's shopping list included "turnkey facilities, full-sized production lines, industrial know-how, high-tech spare parts, and raw materials."

 Iraq made agreements to buy missile and conventional weapon components from companies in Ukraine, Belarus, Romania and Russia. The deals also included high-tech machine tools useful in building both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Jordanian middlemen played a key role in most of the sales."

Quoted:
If the American media was half as interested in protecting the country as they are in defeating George Bush, they could make some BIG headlines here...

A lot of heat would be lifted off of us if CNN et al went to the Germans and the French and asked them to explain certain sales made to Iraq since the Gulf War...

Quoted:
I wonder how many other countries are involved ?

So far we have the French and now the Germans
supporting our enemy.

Quoted:


I believe Israel sold some enriched uranium to Iraq a few years back.

Quoted:


I don't know about that but I do recall us delivering many shipments of "depleted uranium" to Iraq a few years ago. They got a "smoking" deal on them too! [devil]