http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp?cp1=1
This is an article from Newsweek. I will only post the first section.
Later sections move on to related topics. But one must wonder over the
number of wrinkles that show up in this war debate.
Exclusive: The Defector's Secrets
Before his death, a high-ranking defector said Iraq had not abandoned
its WMD ambitions
Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam
Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N.
inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all
its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.
KAMEL WAS SADDAM Hussein's son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he
claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and
missile programs. Kamel told his Western interrogators that he hoped his
revelations would trigger Saddam's overthrow. But after six months in exile
in Jordan, Kamel realized the United States would not support his dream of
becoming Iraq's ruler after Saddam's demise. He chose to return to
Iraq-where he was promptly killed.
Kamel's revelations about the destruction of Iraq's WMD stocks were
hushed up by the U.N. inspectors, sources say, for two reasons. Saddam did
not know how much Kamel had revealed, and the inspectors hoped to bluff
Saddam into disclosing still more. And Iraq has never shown the
documentation to support Kamel's story. Still, the defector's tale raises
questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.
Kamel said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions. The stocks had
been destroyed to hide the programs from the U.N. inspectors, but Iraq had
retained the design and engineering details of these weapons. Kamel talked
of hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and even missile-warhead
molds. "People who work in MIC [Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, which
oversaw the country's WMD programs] were asked to take documents to their
houses," he said. Why preserve this technical material? Said Kamel: "It is
the first step to return to production" after U.N. inspections wind down.
Kamel was interrogated in separate sessions by the CIA, Britain's
M.I.6 and a trio from the United Nations, led by the inspection team's head,
Rolf Ekeus. NEWSWEEK has obtained the notes of Kamel's U.N. debrief, and
verified that the document is authentic. NEWSWEEK has also learned that
Kamel told the same story to the CIA and M.I.6. (The CIA did not respond to
a request for comment.)
The notes of the U.N. interrogation-a three-hour stretch one August evening
in 1995- show that Kamel was a gold mine of information. He had a good
memory and, piece by piece, he laid out the main personnel, sites and
progress of each WMD program. Kamel was a manager-not a scientist or
engineer-and, sources say, some of his technical assertions were later found
to be faulty. (A military aide who defected with Kamel was apparently a more
reliable source of tech-nical data. This aide backed Kamel's assertions
about the destruction of WMD stocks.) But, overall, Kamel's information was
"almost embarrass-ing, it was so extensive," Ekeus recalled-including the
fact that Ekeus's own Arabic translator, a Syrian, was, according to Kamel,
an Iraqi agent who had been reporting to Kamel himself all along.
xponent
War/Not War Maru
rob
________________________________
You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
the universe is laughing behind your back.
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