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THE ROVING EYE
Selective reading and
choice friends
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.
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.
Chalabi, a 54-year-old banker, heir of a rich
Shi'ite family, was living in early 2003 in a lavish
mansion in Tehran paid by the State Department, plotting
his triumphant return to Iraq after more than two
decades. He never had any political support inside Iraq.
After his conviction - 22 years - in Jordan in the early
1980s for bank fraud, nobody knows what he made of
lavish funds dispensed to the INC by the CIA in the
mid-1990s. And in late 2002, nobody also knew what
happened to half of the US$4.3 million once again
dispensed to the INC.
Chalabi is an extremely
persuasive character. It was himself who proposed to
Washington a mutual collaboration against Saddam.
Ultra-conservative American senators Trent Lott and
Jesse Helms loved it, as well as the "Prince of
Darkness" Richard Perle, the CIA and the Jewish lobby.
In their 1999 book Out of the Ashes, Andrew and
Patrick Cockburn paint a devastating portrait of CIA
agent Chalabi's wheelings and dealings since 1991. But
the fact is Washington would never trust the INC to
depose Saddam: the emphasis - or wishful thinking -
relied on a coup orchestrated by the army. Chalabi was
progressively relegated to oblivion. In desperation, he
launched a plan in 1996 for Kurds to attack Iraqi army
units stationed in Mosul and Kirkuk. The operation
failed miserably. Chalabi was totally discredited in the
CIA's eyes, and they turned to another potential and
more trustworthy agent: Ayad Allaoui, chief of the Iraqi
National Accord (INA).
With the neo-cons in
power, the tireless Chalabi managed to get back into the
limelight via the Pentagon - even though the CIA and the
State Department now openly despised him. The go-between
was none other than Richard Perle. Once again, this
correspondent in the past few weeks has been able to
reconfirm that Chalabi's street credibility in Iraq is
less than zero. The most flattering compliment he gets
is that he may be the new "American Saddam".
In
his new self-attributed role of respected statesman,
Chalabi was part of the Iraqi delegation to the recent
UN General Assembly. In the first address by an Iraqi to
the 191-member body since the fall of Saddam's regime,
Chalabi could do no better than scold France, Germany,
Russia, Syria and in fact most of the planet for
opposing the American invasion. He said absolutely
nothing about a UN role in Iraq - now desperately wanted
by the Bush administration. He said absolutely nothing
about how and when Iraqis will get back their
sovereignty - a key UN demand. But true to form, Chalabi
promoted his own personal political causes: he called
for the "eradication" of Ba'ath Party members "once and
for all".
The Pentagon still buys his take that
the Iraqi resistance is conducted by "remnants of
Saddam's regime". In fact, the Pentagon still parrots
everything Chalabi says. But on a more serious note,
Chalabi can be accused of promoting a sectarian war in
Iraq. Weeks before coming to the UN, he recommended the
arrest of brothers, sons, nephews and cousins of Ba'ath
Party members and former Iraqi army officials, as well
as male Iraqis between the ages of 15 and 50 if illegal
weapons were found in their homes. If this
"recommendation" was to be taken seriously, it would
mean no less than an horrendous civil war.
Chief
US weapons inspector David Kay's interim report on WMD
has already proved that the Bush administration was
chasing a ghost. In fact, Kay should save the extra 600
million demanded by Bush for the investigation to
continue and ask the Pentagon's "humint" Chalabi where
the weapons are. With friends like Chalabi, "liberated"
Iraqi certainly doesn't need enemies.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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