Evidence 'useless'

Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

"Documents used to bolster the United States' claims that Iraq presented a nuclear threat were handed to the US by an Italian journalist after her magazine decided they were too unreliable to publish, Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported yesterday.

The report piled further pressure on the US authorities to explain how crudely-forged documents relating to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger might have been used to argue for a war.

Elisabetta Burba, a journalist at the current affairs magazine Panorama, said she received the documents in October 2002 but concluded they did not stand scrutiny and passed them to US diplomats in Rome."



Apparently US diplomats are much more gullible than italian journalists ! ;)

Iraq row over fate of seized scientists

Sunday July 20, 2003
The Observer

American efforts at finding top Iraqi scientists who can attest to Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction have turned out to be as fruitless as the search for the weapons themselves.

(…)

Washington officials hoped that, with Saddam's removal, the people who had intimate knowledge of Iraq's secret arms industry would give a different story from the denials given while he still held sway.

But as pressure intensifies on President George Bush and Tony Blair to prove Iraq had WMD, the inability to produce a single scientist from the former regime to confirm the assertions about an alleged threat is becoming an embarrassment. (…)
"

whole text :
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,1002036,00.html