FAIR: Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed

[Seth Ackerman]

FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
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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,
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