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Opinion/Editorial What did the Iraqi defector say? Chris Krom and Rania Masri, Electronic Iraq 11 March 2003 Last week Newsweek magazine dropped a news bombshell, blowing away key pieces of President Bush's case for war -- even as we hear that an Iraq invasion is a foregone conclusion. In the March 3 issue, Newsweek reporter John Barry exposed testimony from a defecting Iraqi weapons chief stating that, by the mid-1990s, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed. The source of this explosive news -- which disproves Bush's central assertion that Iraq has a "vast stockpile" of weapons from the Persian Gulf war "that has not been accounted for" -- was Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, Kamel was killed in Iraq in 1996 after smuggling crates of secret information to the U.N. about Iraq's weapons programs. Ironically, Kamel has also been "Exhibit A" in Bush's case for war, cited by Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and most recently Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, who told the Chicago Tribune that it was "because of information provided... by Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel" that we know Iraq "cheated" on weapons programs. But Barry obtained original notes from Kamel's 1995 U.N. testimony. What Kamel actually said, Barry reports, is "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." Kamel's report was "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors," Newsweek says. For its part, the Bush team has conveniently been citing only the part of Kamel's testimony in which he stated that Iraq still had blueprints and equipment for future weapons production. Last week, CIA officials again tried to quiet the story, calling it "incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue." But two days later, a transcript posted online shows Kamel plainly stating that "all weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear -- were destroyed," belying Bush's grounds for war. Haven't heard about the Kamel scandal? Not surprising. Despite the near- fatal blow it deals to Bush's basis for war -- and more disturbingly, how it implicates government agencies in suppressing inconvenient facts -- to date, no TV networks and just a few newspapers have picked up the Newsweek story. The Kamel episode is just the latest in a two-month barrage of revelations that have reduced to rubble Bush's claim that the small, impoverished nation of Iraq, crawling with arms inspectors, poses an "imminent threat." First came news that Powell's show-and-tell before the U.N. earlier this year was, according to the Financial Times, based on "plagiarized and out- of-date material." Then Hans Blix reported that U.N. inspectors had followed up on each of Powell's "leads," and found them to be "garbage." None turned up weapons; journalists scoured one supposed "poisons factory" and found only a bakery. Astonishingly, Bush also insists on alleging ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda terrorists, even though the charge has been flatly denied by British intelligence, who say there's "no link," and CIA officials, who told The New York Times "we just don't think (the link) is there." What is known is that an Iraq invasion would kill lots of innocent people. A little-noticed report from U.N. relief workers predicts a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale and magnitude," with "30 percent of Iraqi children under age five at risk of death." At home, American soldiers will return dead, or will end up disabled, like 149,000 veterans from the Gulf War. An invasion would rob up to $200 billion from jobs, health care and schools. Is such devastation really worth it, when we have the viable alternative of U.N. inspections? The France-bashing loonies may be viewing even french fries with suspicion, but they have yet to refute President Jacques Chirac's point that post-Gulf War inspections destroyed more Iraq weapons than all of America's firepower. No wonder that -- according to the rallying cry of 10 million protesters around the world on Feb. 15 -- "the world says no to war." A few governments have caved in to Bush's Sopranos- style arm-twisting and bribes. But the vast majority of the world's people stand resolute against a war they view as arrogant, dangerous and unnecessary. Can the war be stopped? Bush's battle obsession does not inspire confidence. The damage to our country's credibility and world standing has already been done. But millions will continue to demand that Bush listen to the evidence, and the will of the people, and say no to war. Chris Kromm and Dr. Rania Masri are co-directors of the Southern Peace Research & Education Center, based at the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham Related Links: Factsheet: Still no case for war © 2003 Electronic Iraq/electronicIraq.net, a joint project from Voices in the Wilderness and The Electronic Intifada. Views expressed on this page may or may not be representative of Electronic Iraq or its founders. For website or publication reprint permission, please contact us. All other forms of mass reproduction for educational and activist use are encouraged. Page last updated: 11 March 2003, 23:59 CST. Forwarded for your information. 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