Saddam's Scientists Not Talking About WMDs
ALSO: -- • Terror Alert Drops, But Are We Safer?
Saddam's Scientists Not Talking About WMDs
By Jacqueline Shire and Risa Molitz
April 17 — When two former Iraqi regime leaders surrendered to U.S. authorities early this week, coalition officials anticipated uncovering a treasure trove of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.
ABCNEWS has learned, however, that the two men, who were privy to critical details about Iraq's WMD development and capability, have not provided the smoking gun investigators hoped for.
Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, considered to be the godfather of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, is insisting that Iraq discontinued its nuclear weapons program after United Nations weapons inspections began in 1991, according to senior coalition intelligence officials.
Sources also tell ABCNEWS that Gen. Amir Al-Saadi, No. 55 on the U.S. military's list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqi regime members, is providing information "of limited value." Al-Saadi designed Iraq's biological and chemical weapons program, and stood as a liaison to U.N. inspectors last fall.
Both men turned themselves over to the U.S. military this week.
Al-Saadi, Saddam's top scientific adviser, surrendered to the Marines in front of German TV cameras on Saturday. Al-Saadi said he did not know the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, and claimed that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Jaffar fled to Syria soon after the military campaign in Iraq began, and surrendered to U.S. forces from a third Arab country.
Jaffar and Al-Saadi have longstanding relationships with U.N. weapons inspectors, both traveling to New York regularly for talks over the years aimed at resolving outstanding issues related to Iraq's weapons programs.
They are generally described as sophisticated, intelligent and well-spoken scientists, according to sources familiar with weapons inspections.
Their marriages to European women (Jaffar eventually divorced his British wife), foreign travel and university degrees from abroad helped keep them out of Saddam's close inner circle, though.
Jaffar was jailed and briefly tortured in the 1980s and for protesting the arrest of a colleague, Dr. Hussein Shahristani, who spent years in prison for refusing to extract plutonium from Iraq's French-built research reactor. Shahristani eventually escaped.
Terror Alert Drops, But Are We Safer?
By Pierre Thomas and Beverley Lumpkin
April 17 — Now that the federal government has lowered the national terror threat from high — orange — to elevated — yellow — are we really any safer?
Sources told ABCNEWS that the threat level was lowered because the major conflict in Iraq is winding down.
As the U.S. victory became more and more evident, the sources said, the chatter of known terrorist operatives dissipated a bit.
Also, just the fact that the level was raised, and the accompanying massive show of police in major cities, may have disrupted potential terrorist acts.
Sources emphasized that the threat remains, and that the nation is still at an elevated risk of terrorist attack.
"The threat is still there," one official said.
In other words, raising the threat level may have simply pushed the bad guys underground, only to attack at some later time.
So are we safer? Probably not. Sources point out that all threat assessment is a very inexact science.
Still, DHS official said that within the next several days they also plan to stand down on Operation Liberty Shield, the extra security measures that were put in place because of the Iraq hostilities.
Conversations have already been held with state and local authorities about scaling back most components of Liberty Shield, although the recommendation has also been made to keep some random, or rolling, patrols in place of the beefed-up ones under the operation.
There may be other measures that individual state localities may take under their own discretion that can continue to deter terrorists' acts while still standing down from the stringent Liberty Shield measures.
New York City, for instance is maintaining an orange threat level and, for the time being, its own intensive security program, dubbed Operation Atlas.
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