Al-Arab Blog - مدونة العرب
2004/02/27
Lies and a Legacy of Lies lead up to "WARGATE"
Lies and a Legacy of Lies lead up to "WARGATE"
Lies
Bush is a criminal liar, with his lies he has killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of American soldiers and countless ( ! ) Iraqi men women and children.
But Bush does not stand alone, Bush is the very tip of a huge iceberg :
Each of these Bush lies was propagated by media swarms and countless liars:
I could go on and on, but we've got even more real hardcore, honest to goodness, Grade A lies to address.
A Legacy of Lies
: "A Legacy of Lies "The Defector's Tale
In August of 1995, Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's weapons industries, defected to Jordan carrying crate-loads of secret documents on weapons of mass destruction in tow. He announced that he would work for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and he began cooperating with officials from the CIA, British intelligence and the U.N. inspectors.
The defection was front-page news worldwide. In a panic, the Iraqi regime handed over millions of additional documents it had previously kept hidden. It was the most damaging exposure of Saddam's secret weapons programs since Operation Desert Storm. The information proved, once and for all, that Iraq had been lying about its weapons programs: its pre-Gulf War efforts to build and perfect biological weapons had progressed much further than the regime had ever admitted, and Iraq still retained some production equipment .
In February 1996, Kamel, an unstable man disillusioned with his reception in the West, tried to return to Iraq. Upon arriving, he and his family were gunned down by militias allied with the regime. But by that time, he had already spilled the beans on Iraq's weapons programs to the U.N. and the CIA.
Over the next three years, as the Clinton team barnstormed the media to warn of the WMD threat from Saddam, they repeatedly invoked the Kamel episode as proof that Iraq was still concealing a dangerous arsenal. For example, in February 1998, President Clinton gave a major policy speech arguing that Iraq must be threatened with force. He explained that "Saddam has spent the better part of the past decade trying to cheat" on his disarmament obligations and that "meeting the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is important to our security." "Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions," he said, including "an offensive biological warfare capability -- notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs."
As evidence of the threat, Clinton solemnly recounted the defector's tale: "In 1995, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more.” Kamel's defection was similarly invoked virtually every time a senior Clinton policy maker addressed the Iraq issue during the inspections crises of 1997-98. Sandy Berger said it "forced [Iraq] to reveal additional weapons stockpiles and production capacity it had insisted it did not have." Madeleine Albright said it "marked a turning point" in Saddam's efforts at deception. And William Cohen said that as a result, "Iraq confessed to having materials and munitions it had lied about for years."
Kamel became the poster child for Iraq's strategy of deceit and concealment. His name was bandied around on Sunday morning talk-shows and newspaper op-eds. He featured prominently in a Frontline documentary on Iraq and he turned up in articles in The New Republic and The Weekly Standard.
And Kamel's usefulness even outlasted the Clinton years. When Bush administration officials made their case for an invasion in 2002 and 2003, they repeated Kamel's story even more frequently than the Clinton team had -- this time to argue that Saddam's hidden weapons were so expertly concealed that inspections were of little value.
Testifying before Congress, Donald Rumsfeld declared: "Unless we have people inside the Iraqi program who are willing to tell us what they have and where they have it - as we did in 1995 with the defection of Saddam's son in law, Hussein Kamel - it is easy for the Iraqi regime to hide its capabilities from us."
Bush's United Nations address also cited Kamel's defection, as did Dick Cheney's August 2002 speech, which argued for skipping inspections and jumping straight to war. Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as a result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself," Cheney warned.
Eight years after his defection Hussein Kamel was dead, but his story had become immortal.
But Kamel's revelations had not been what they seemed.
In February 2003, as the worldwide debate over war was just reaching a crescendo, Newsweek reporter John Barry obtained a classified copy of the original U.N. transcript of Hussein Kamel's 1995 debriefing by Rolf Ekeus and his UNSCOM colleagues. Barry, a veteran of the Iraqi WMD beat, wrote up his scoop in a little item, a mere six paragraphs long, that appeared in the magazine's "Periscope" section. Although it received virtually no notice at the time, what Barry wrote seemed to turn the whole Iraq story on its head:
"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 [in 1991] after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.
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.
Still, the defector's tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist."
When the story failed to win exposure in the media, a handful of writers and analysts on both sides of the Atlantic (including this writer), viewing the news as a major bombshell, took it upon themselves to publicize it. One of the group, Glen Rangwala, a Middle East specialist at Cambridge University, managed to obtain a copy of the transcript himself. He immediately posted it on his website.
A fifteen-page typewritten U.N. document stamped "SENSITIVE," the transcript made it clear that almost everything the world thought it knew about Iraq's WMD was wrong. It was minutely detailed and often quite technical, a cross-examination of one specialist by another. And although Kamel used different words at different points in the interview, his story was always the same. He stated it most simply on page 13:
"All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." The destruction took place in the summer of 1991.
posted by تـــمّـــوز الـبابـلـي, 2/27/2004
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Anti War - Anti Racism
Let the downFall of Sharon be end to Zionism
By the Late, great political cartoonist Mahmoud Kahil
