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FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
MEDIA ADVISORY:
Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed:
Bombshell revelation from a defector cited by White House and press
February 27, 2003
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the
Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the
WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still
exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi
weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N.
inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical
and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.
Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning
to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's
deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs
had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi
weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript
of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.
Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its
chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver
them," Barry wrote. All that remained were "hidden blueprints,
computer disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were
destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors,
in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had
finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported,
and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's
assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."
But these statements were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order
to "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more."
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. "It is
incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," Harlow told Reuters the day the
report appeared (2/24/03).
But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript--
an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"-- was obtained by
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February
revealed that Tony Blair's "intelligence dossier" was plagiarized from
a student thesis. Rangwala has posted the Kamel transcript on the Web:
http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf.
In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: "All weapons--
biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."
Who is Hussein Kamel?
Kamel is no obscure defector. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, his
departure from Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq's past
weapons programs was a major turning point in the inspections saga. In
1999, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council (1/25/99), UNSCOM
reported that its entire eight years of disarmament work "must be
divided into two parts, separated by the events following the
departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamel."
Kamel's defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and
leading administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not
disarmed; 2) inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as
Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons.
* Bush declared in an October 7, 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several
years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military
industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit
that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other
deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq
had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive
stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and
capable of killing millions."
* Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the
U.N. Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally
admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A
single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The
admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a
result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late
son-in-law."
* In a speech last August (8/27/02), Vice President Dick Cheney said
Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned
more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection
regime itself."
* Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recently wrote in
the Chicago Tribune (2/16/03) that "because of information provided by
Iraqi defector and former head of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
programs, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the regime had to admit in detail
how it cheated on its nuclear non-proliferation commitments."
The quotes from Bush and Powell cited above refer to anthrax and VX
produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has
cited various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many
other occasions-- weapons that Iraq produced but which remain
unaccounted for. All of these claims refer to weapons produced before
1991.
But according to Kamel's transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these
weapons in 1991.
According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in
August 1995. If that is true, all of these U.S. officials have had
access to Kamel's statements that the weapons were destroyed. Their
repeated citations of his testimony-- without revealing that he also
said the weapons no longer exist-- suggests that the administration
might be withholding critical evidence. In particular, it casts doubt
on the credibility of Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N.,
which was widely hailed at the time for its persuasiveness. To clear
up the issue, journalists might ask that the CIA release the
transcripts of its own conversations with Kamel.
Kamel's disclosures have also been crucial to the arguments made by
hawkish commentators on Iraq. The defector has been cited four times
on the New York Times op-ed page in the last four months in support of
claims about Iraq's weapons programs--never noting his assertions
about the elimination of these weapons. In a major Times op-ed calling
for war with Iraq (2/21/03), Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings
Institution wrote that Kamel and other defectors "reported that
outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program,
it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone
had imagined it to be." The release of Kamel's transcript makes this
claim appear grossly at odds with the defector's actual testimony.
The Kamel story is a bombshell that necessitates a thorough
reevaluation of U.S. media reporting on Iraq, much of which has taken
for granted that the nation retains supplies of prohibited weapons.
(See FAIR Media Advisory, "Iraq's Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to
Fact," http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html .) Kamel's
testimony is not, of course, proof that Iraq does not have hidden
stocks of chemical or biological weapons, but it does suggest a need
for much more media skepticism about U.S. allegations than has
previously been shown.
Unfortunately, Newsweek chose a curious way to handle its scoop: The
magazine placed the story in the miscellaneous "Periscope" section
with a generic headline, "The Defector's Secrets." Worse, Newsweek's
online version added a subhead that seemed almost designed to undercut
the importance of the story: "Before his death, a high-ranking
defector said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions." So far,
according to a February 27 search of the Nexis database, no major U.S.
newspapers or national television news shows have picked up the
Newsweek story.
***
Read the Newsweek story:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp
***
Read Glen Rangwala's analysis of the Kamel transcript:
http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html
***
If you'd like to encourage media outlets to investigate this story,
contact information is available on FAIR's website:
http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html
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"La historia es nuestra
y la hacen los pueblos"
--- Salvador Allende
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"La historia es nuestra
y la hacen los pueblos"
--- Salvador Allende
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