War plan on homestretch

THE FACADE of the US-British allegations to justify a
war against Iraq has disintergrated in the homestetch
to a new UN resolution. Fresh revelations have
highlighted that Washington has been resorting to
blatant deception in its effort to secure domestic and
international support for its plans for military
action aimed at "regime change" in Baghdad.
Almost every contention made by Washington and London
while building their case for war against Iraq have
been found to be deceptive, whether linked to Saddam's
alleged weapons of mass destruction or his alleged
alliance with Osama Bin Laden and support for
"international terrorism."
The latest weapon to pierce through the US armour of
contentions and arguments for war against Iraq came
from a hitherto secret transcript of an interview that
senior UN weapons inspectors held with an Iraqi
defector, Hussein Kamel Hassan Al Majed, a son-in-law
of Saddam Hussein, in August 1995.
That transcript shows that Kamel, who had defected
from Iraq, told the then chief of UN weapon
inspectors, Sweden's Rolf Ekeus, that he, in his
capacity as head of Iraq's Military Industrialisation
Commission, had ordered the destruction of the
country's entire stockpile of chemical and biological
weapons and banned missiles.
He also told Ekeus, who headed the UN Special
Commission (Unscom), that all that remained ere
"hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and
production dies. The weapons were destroyed secretly,
in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in
the hope of someday resuming production after
inspections had finished, he told Ekeus, who was
accompanied by Maurizio Zifferero. deputy director of
the IAEA and head of the inspections team in Iraq, and
Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat who led Unscom's
ballistic missile team.
Kamel, who returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was
killed (see separate story), repeated the same
assertions to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
and Britain's MI6 while he was in Amman, said
Newsweek, which added that these statements were
"hushed up by the UN inspectors" in order to "bluff
Saddam into disclosing still more."
Predictably, the CIA rejected the report. "It is
incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," said CIA spokesman
Bill Harlow in a statement to Reuters commenting on
the Newsweek revelations.
However, Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University
analyst who in early February exposed that a British
"intelligence report" on Iraq was plagiarised from an
academic thesis, got hold the actual Ekeus-Kamel
transcript and has released it (see
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf).
Washington now finds itself caught further in its own
web.
It has to either stand by assertions made by President
George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and
Secretary of State Colin Powell that Kamel, the Iraqi
defector, was a treasure trove of information and that
had it not been for him the world would not have known
of Iraq's weapons programme; or it has to reject
Kamel's statement in its entirety including his
revelations of Iraq's weapons programme and that all
the weapons stockpiles were destroyed. The Bush
administration cannot be selective and accept as
truth Kamel's disclosures about the weapons programme
and reject as lie the assertion that the stockpile of
weapons was destroyed.
Without any trace of doubt, Washington had access to
the Ekeus-Kamel transcript, the contents of which were
backed by Kamel's statements to the CIA during his
nearly seven-month exile in Jordan. As such, the
presumption goes that the Bush aides who had gone
through the document deliberately held back parts of
it from the presidential eyes or Bush himself chose to
ignore those comments which undermined his case
against Iraq.
Almost all the US claims against Iraq have been
rejected by UN weapons inspectors as well as
international experts.
While the contradictions do not make Saddam an angel
or do away with the stigma of dictatorial appression
attached to him, they do highlight the US and British
desparation to deceive the world into accepting that
he poses a major threat to the region and indeed the
international community.
In his analysis of the US approach to Kamel's
statement, Rangwala notes that Bush and others in his
administration have repeatedly cited the Iraqi
defector's statements as evidence that Iraq has not
disarmed, that inspections cannot disarm it, and that
defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source
of information on Iraq's weapons.
The Cambridge analyst also notes that Bush said in an
Oct.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 litres 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."
Powell's said in a Feb. 5 presentation to the UN
Security Council: "It took years for Iraq to finally
admit that it had produced four tonnes of the deadly
nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will
kill in minutes. Four tonnes. 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 an Aug.27, 2002 speeach, Cheney asserted that
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."
Bush and Powell were actually referring to anthrax
and VX produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War as
were all the weapons cited by Kamel, who, according
to the Ekeus transcript, also said that Iraq
destroyed all these weapons in 1991.
Kamel told Ekeus during the August 1995 meeting in
Amman: "I ordered destruction of all chemical
weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile,
nuclear were destroyed."
"Not a single missile left but they had blueprints and
molds for production," he said. "All missiles were
destroyed."
On anthrax, he said it was the "main focus" of the
biological programme , but that "nothing remained"
after he ordered the stocks destroyed following visits
by UN inspection teams.
"I made the decision to disclose everything so that
Iraq could return to normal" so that the sanctions
could be lifted, he told Ekeus.
Kamel admitted that Iraq had loaded chemical weapons t
in bombs during last days of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq
war. "They were not used and the programme was
terminated," he told Ekeus..
Interestingly, Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat
who succeeded Ekeus in 1997, has never referred to
Kamel's statements during his meetings with the press
and declined to answer any questions in this context.
Among the many other statements, claims and
contentions made by Bush and others in their push for
UN and international backing for their plans for war
against Iraq are those about nuclear weapons.
Among these contradictions are:
The admistration has asserted that the International
Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Iraq
had an advanced nuclear weapons development programme
, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was enriching
uranium for a bomb.
However, the IAEA has reported to the UN Security
Council that it had found that Iraq’s nuclear capacity
had been completely dismantled by 1998.
In a 1998 report, the agency said that there were "no
indications that there remains in Iraq any physical
capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear
material of any practical significance."
In its latest report to the Security Council, IAEA
chief Mohammed Al Baradei stated that the agency
"found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear
weapons program since the elimination of the programme
in the 1990’s.”  That statement is supported by a
former Iraqi nuclear scientist who now lives in Canada
who says that Iraq does not have the expertise and
hardware to produce a nuclear bomb.
Compare the IAEA report and the scientist's assertion
with Bush's claim in September 2002 that the IAEA
had stated in a report that Iraq was “six months away
from developing a [nuclear] weapon." Someone should
ask Bush and his aides for a copy of that specific
report.
No such report actually exists. 
Washington has charged that Iraq “had attempted to
purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
nuclear weapons production.” But the IAEA contradicts
that charge saying the aluminum tubes were not
suitable for nuclear use. 
The Institute for Science and International Security
also says that it found the Bush contention to be
“very misleading."
The Bush administration is “selectively picking
information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear
threat was more imminent than it is, and, in essence,
scare people,” says the institute.
Powell claimed that UN weapons inspectors had found
that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit
materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their
discovery and that Iraq had developed mobile
biological weapons laborataries.
However, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix
contradicted the assertion by saying that “inspectors
had reported no such incidents” of hiding or moving
illicit materials and that they have seen “no
evidence” of mobile biological weapons labs.
Independent experts have ridiculed a claim by Bush
that Iraq had a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft
that could be used “for missions targeting the United
States.” Iraq does not have that kind of advance
technology and there is no evidence whatsoever that it
acquired such unmanned aircraft with the range to
reach the US.
Countering the Bush administration's claims that Iraq
"aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al
Qaeda," is the reality that the Central Intelligence
Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
British intelligence agencies have found no link
between Al Qaeda and Iraq. 
If anything, a British intelligence report -- that has
never been made public by the Blair government -- says
that there could have no link between Saddam and Bin
Laden if only because of their "ideological"
differences.
While the US claims that Iraq had the materials to
produce as much as 500 tonnes of sarin, mustard and VX
nerve agent and has given no evidence that it  has
destroyed them, the UN inspectors say that by 1998 at
least 95 per cent of Iraq’s chemical weapons had been
accounted for and destroyed. 
Agaisnt the US assertion that the UN had found that
Iraq had materials sufficient to produce more than
38,000 litres of botulinum toxic, a 1999 UN report
said that Iraq had to account only for an amount of
the growth media for the toxin that could produce
1,200 litres of botulinum toxin.
Blix has also shot down an American contention that
Iraqi intelligence officers were posing as the
scientists inspectors are supposed to interview.
The littany of the US deception also includes a claim
by Defenee Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that he had
“nothing to do” with helping Iraq in its war against
Iran and that he cautioned Saddam about the use of
chemical weapons in a 90-minute meeting in 1983. In
reality, Rumsfeld led a delegation to Iraq to resume
diplomatic relations in order to prevent an Iranian
victory in the war, according to State Department
notes of the Rumsfeld-Saddam meeting as reported by
The Washington Post in late December 2002.
What is the net impact of these revelations of deceit?

Definitely not a rethink of the US and British plans
for war against Iraq. However, that is not all. If
anything, in the days ahead the world would be privvy
to further revelations of the hidden motives and
ulterior objectives of the American-British plans for
Iraq. And that would further erode chances of any
legitimacy for any war against Iraq. Obviously,
neither Washington nor London could afford any delay
that would leave room for further undermining of their
plans; and hence their haste to set a March 17
deadline for war.