U.S. WMD Lies: Everyone knew it

posted by ewing2001 on Tuesday October 07, @03:27AM

Selective reading and choice friends

Asia Times - Oct 7, 2003 By Pepe Escobar

BAGHDAD and AMMAN - Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix knew it. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter knew it. French, German and Russian intelligence knew it. Sultan Hashim Ahmad - Iraq's former minister of defense, now safe after a cosy deal with the Americans - knew it.

In 1995, Hussein Kamel, married to one of Saddam Hussein's daughters and the man in charge of it all, knew it. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley and the MI6 in London knew it.

Saddam's regime was not lying when it claimed that it had destroyed all its WMD after the 1991 Gulf War. Whatever the spin, the fact of the matter is that now there's conclusive proof that both US President George W Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair lied about the reason for invading Iraq.

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As it was widely reported at the time, on the night of August 7, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, former director of Iraq's Military Industrialization Corp - the organism in charge of Iraq's weapons program - defected to Jordan, along with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel.

Hussein Kamel managed to smuggle tons of documents with him with priceless information about different Iraqi weapons programs. A few days later, Saddam's regime went on the offensive, presenting another set of documents showing that Iraq had conducted an aborted crash program to develop a nuclear bomb. A few months later, Hussein and Saddam Kamel made the biggest mistake of their lives. Following family pleas and giving credence to assurances from Baghdad, they returned to Iraq in early 1996, and were inevitably killed by Saddam's secret services.

On August 22, 1995, Hussein Kamel was interviewed in Amman by three top Western officials: Rolf Ekeus, executive chairman of UNSCOM from 1991 to 1997; Professor Maurizio Zifferero, deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and head of the inspections team in Iraq; and Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat who led UNSCOM's ballistic missile team, and Deputy Director for Operations of UNSCOM. Major Izz al-Din al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein's who defected with the Kamel brothers, was also present. Unlike the brothers, he remained in Jordan and exiled himself in Europe in an undisclosed location.

The key document - shown to Asia Times Online by a Jordanian intelligence source - is in the form of an internal UNSCOM/IAEA report classified as "sensitive". On page 13 of what is the transcript of the UNSCOM/IAEA interview with Hussein Kamel, he categorically says, "I ordered the destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." He also says that "not a single missile was left, but they had blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed."

Kamel discloses that anthrax was "the main focus" of the Iraqi biological program (pages 7-8). He confirms all weapons and agents were destroyed: "Nothing remained after visits of inspection teams." Kamel also says, "They put VX [nerve gas] in bombs during the last days of the Iran-Iraq war [of the 1980s]. They were not used and the program was terminated." On page 13, Rolf Ekeus asks Kamel if Iraq had restarted VX production after the Iran-Iraq war. Kamel says, "We changed the factory into pesticide production. Part of the establishment started to produce medicine [...] we gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons." On page 8, Kamel insists that "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal."

In August 1995, both the Bill Clinton administration in the US and the John Major government in the UK took Kamel's assertion that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles - as Saddam's regime claimed - very seriously. But this "sensitive" interview was kept secret for more than seven years. It was only leaked in early 2003. Kamel's interview was then endlessly spun by Bush and Blair. But the key point remains undisputable: Saddam's regime destroyed all its WMD after the 1991 Gulf War.

This was not the soundbite that the Pentagon neo-conservatives wanted. So they listened instead to their lone "humint" (human intelligence) on Iraq - which entirely consists in the person of Ahmad Chalabi, founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) - an organization basically created by the US - a convicted fraudster in Jordan, and rotating chairman during the month of September of the 25-member, American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

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