Powell speech expo - 1 - February 2003
Mystery factory - We visited this site a few days after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his exciting speech about Sadam Hussein's hidden weapons. I felt it was an important moment in history. I imagined the feelings of the inspectors while they were visiting Iraq's suspected facilities. And I was envious of their mysterious job. That's why I used fragments of Mr. Powell's speech to illustrate my feelings during this expedition. I use the material for aesthetic and poetic purposes - it has no political intent.

The expedition consist of four parts: the mystery factory revisited, the silo revisited, the unexpected tunnel and the siberian finale.
The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. ... people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to.

Look at the image on the left. On the left is a close-up of one of the four chemical bunkers. The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions.

I cannot tell you everything that we know. But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling.
Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.
We know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium. ... There is controversy about what these tubes are for.
... they were trying to clean up the area to leave no evidence behind of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. And they can claim that nothing was there. And the inspectors can look all they want, and they will find nothing.
Saddam Hussein and his regime are not just trying to conceal weapons, they're also trying to hide people. On orders from Saddam Hussein, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate for one scientist, and he was sent into hiding.
You will now hear an officer from Republican Guard headquarters issuing an instruction to an officer in the field. Their conversation took place just last week on January 30. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, pouring for hours and hours over light tables.
Everything we have seen and heard indicates that, instead of cooperating actively ... Saddam Hussein and his regime are busy doing all they possibly can to ensure that inspectors succeed in finding absolutely nothing. Iraq's procurement efforts include equipment that can filter and separate micro-organisms and toxins involved in biological weapons, equipment that can be used to concentrate the agent, ... sterilization equipment for laboratories, glass-lined reactors and specialty pumps that can handle corrosive chemical weapons agents ...
This photograph of the site taken two months later in July shows ... that this previous site, as well as all of the other sites around the site, have been fully bulldozed and graded. The topsoil has been removed. The Iraqis literally removed the crust of the earth from large portions of this site in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence that would be there from years of chemical weapons activity. This is all part of a system of hiding things and moving things out of the way and making sure they have left nothing behind.
... Iraq has built an engine test stand that is larger than anything it has ever had. Notice the dramatic difference in size between the test stand on the left ... and the one on the right. Note the large exhaust vent. This is where the flame from the engine comes out. We know that Iraq has embedded key portions of its illicit chemical weapons infrastructure within its legitimate civilian industry. To all outward appearances, even to experts, the infrastructure looks like an ordinary civilian operation.
At this ballistic missile facility, again, two days before inspections began, five large cargo trucks appeared along with the truck-mounted crane to move missiles. ... these factories can be concealed easily, either by moving ordinary-looking trucks and rail cars along Iraq's thousands of miles of highway or track, or by parking them in a garage or warehouse or somewhere in Iraq's extensive system of underground tunnels and bunkers.
Strange places
Deserted Buildings
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