Fire Engines and Water Trucks and No Decontam Trucks, Oh My!

As the US prepares to annihilate Iraq, it’s worth remembering that it was not just the Iraqis that tried their best to sabotage the inspections process – the US also ensured that the process was frustrated:

Weapons inspector: ‘US gave us wrong data’

A UN weapons inspector who returned from Iraq yesterday said today that the US had given them wrong and misleading information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Jorn Siljeholm, 48, a Norwegian scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent 100 days in Iraq as part of the UN inspections team.

He told the Associated Press that assertions by US officials, including the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, about Iraq’s arsenal and its attempts to hide it, did not tally with his own findings.

“None of their hot tips were ever confirmed,” he said, adding: “I don’t know about a single decontamination truck that didn’t turn out to be a fire engine or a water truck.”