When I saw it first on LBO-talk I forwarded it to the email address of
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
I rang them up on Tuesday morning, and the person I spoke to immediately seemed to recognise the significance of a report that the US and UK governments have concealed crucial information for the defence, on the central issue of WMD. She said she would check the email. I had assumed they would cascade it around various MP's and journalists and a copy of Newsweek would get waved at Tony Blair in the House of Commons.
Perhaps I had forgotten this is contrary to parliamentary privilege. Perhaps the MP's reseachers were not able to check the facts. Perhaps people were put off by the secondary spin in the Newsweek article that actually what is significant is that Sadaam still WANTS to have WMD even if he has not got them. Perhaps the excellent investigative reporters we have in the UK (Newsnight, Guardian/Observer Group, Independent, Channel 4 News, Panorama etc) are all trying to work up their own angle on the story and do not just want to relay a report in Newsweek. Perhaps copyright is involved.
Perhaps there are glitches that are not apparent in the Newsweek report.
But this is much more damaging selective management of evidence than failing to cite a graduate students research, which bounced around the internet like wild fire. What it has in common is serious re-examination of the historical record going back over 12 years. If 12 years ago there is evidence that Sadaam did the things in the UK government briefing, did he also try to destroy the bulk of the anthrax and nerve gas.
Is it that everyone has only a very vague understanding of a legal process behind declaring a lawful war? The UN, that the peace movement rightly wants to say should have precedent over the US, is of course a product of imperialist and capitalist power relations with only a limited ideological commitment to the interests of the people of the world in any direct sense. Votes on the SC are of course bought. The whole convention about vetos is a reflection of realpolitik.
But in any approximation to a clear charge against the Saddam regime which has some weight in international law (forgetting the unbalanced application of SC resolutions to other countries with WMD like Israel) it is that Sadaam still has supplies of anthrax and nerve gas (or similar).
Yes he would have liked to have nuclear weapons but few think he has at the moment and he would like to get them covertly like most countries that have them, did. Yes he has a few missiles which may under certain conditions fly further than an arbitrary limit which makes them bad missiles as opposed to good missiles, and he will destroy those publicly.
Let us unpack the grand obfuscation about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and be clear what the world is being told to go to war about, creating tens of thousands of refugees.
The core indictment, whether you agree with it or not, is that Saddam has retained stocks of anthrax and nerve gas, and similar.
There is authoritative information which the US and UK governments have withheld up till now, that he destroyed them.
Is this a transparently just basis to go to war?
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Now, stripping my preamble, can everyone start a chain mailing of this Newseek report, around all the campaigning and media organisations, and activists, urging everyone to pass it on and to raise questions internally and externally and highlight the issue. It needs to be in ten thousand email boxes within 24 hours.
At 2003-02-27 14:56 -0500, you wrote:
Exclusive: The Defector’s Secrets
By John Barry NEWSWEEK http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp
March 3 issue — 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 technical data. This aide backed Kamel’s assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks.) But, overall, Kamel’s information was "almost embarrassing, 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.
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