Publishing House Criticizes U.S. Government for Arrest of Iraqi Scientist on 'Most Wanted' List By DANIEL DEL CASTILLO
A respected academic publishing house in the United States is demanding the immediate release of Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, an Iraqi scientist whom U.S. military forces arrested last week because of suspicions that she is a key figure in Iraq's alleged biological-weapons program.
South End Press, which published Ms. Ammash's research paper, "Toxic Pollution, the Gulf War, and Sanctions," in Iraq Under Siege, (2002), an anthology about the effects of war and sanctions, has accused the U.S. government of political persecution and attempting to silence the Iraqi scholar through her detainment.
"We are outraged at the U.S.'s extra-legal detention of Dr. Ammash and its plans to interrogate her," Alexander Dwinell, South End's co-publisher, said in a news release. "The U.S. government is trying to silence Dr. Ammash's outspoken criticism of the U.S. role in causing cancers and other illnesses in Iraq through its own use of biologically hazardous weapons such as radioactive depleted uranium," he added.
Ms. Ammash, a former dean at the University of Baghdad who was the most senior woman in Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'ath Party, earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Missouri at Columbia. She has campaigned and written extensively about rising cancer rates among Iraqi children and the purported links between those rates and depleted uranium used by American troops during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. She was No. 53 -- and the only woman -- on the U.S. military's list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis.
"The fact that she has spoken out about these issues makes her far more vulnerable to a politicized treatment," Anthony Arnove, editor of Iraq Under Siege, said in an interview. "I think she was targeted because she was identified as part of the Ba'ath Party power structure and she is a scientist," he said, "and based on that alone she is being considered guilty before any evidence is presented about her ties to Iraq's alleged biological-weapons program."
South End's argument hinges on the failure of United Nations inspectors to find any connections between Ms. Ammash and an illegal Iraqi weapons program. "She was basically cleared by [inspectors with the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] when they checked her at her university in January. If there had been credible allegations, the U.S. would certainly have tried to investigate her at that time," Mr. Dwinell said.
The monitoring group's spokesman, Hiro Ueki, conceded that the U.N. has thus far failed to connect Ms. Ammash to a biological-weapons program in Iraq. She had been interviewed by inspectors from an earlier U.N. commission during the 1990s, he said, "and they did not find any direct evidence that would link her to a biological weapons program." Nor did the more recent inspection team find any "clear evidence to link her to a biological weapons program," Mr. Ueki said. "Having said that, we don't know the full truth about her," he added.
According to Mr. Ueki, Ms. Ammash was one of Iraq's top scientists who quickly rose in the ranks of the Ba'ath Party and became a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, the highest decision-making branch of the party. She was also a former dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Baghdad.
At the University of Missouri, where Ms. Ammash completed her doctorate in 1983, she is not remembered as one of the department's better students. "The quality of the program was not the highest," said Richard Finkelstein, a professor emeritus and the former chairman of the microbiology department from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
"I feel safer if Saddam was using her to head their bioterrorism program because I don't think she was a good student here and I don't think the program was a good one," he said. "Her training doesn't suggest she would be a good head of a bioterrorism program."
As of yet, no formal charges have been brought by the U.S. government against Ms. Ammash. Officials at several U.S. government agencies refused to discuss South End's assertions that Ms. Ammash was being politically persecuted because of her research on the effects of depleted uranium used by U.S. forces. Nor would they disclose whether she had surrendered or been captured.
"She is being held and questioned because she is associated with the Saddam Hussein regime and with various weapons-of-mass-destruction programs and human-rights violations -- with everything that regime was associated with, she was a part of," said Lt. Yvonne Lukson, a spokeswoman at the United States Central Command in Qatar.
Officials at the Pentagon and the United States Central Command referred further inquires to the Defense Intelligence Agency, which created the most-wanted list. Officials there declined to provide a motive or rationale for Ms. Ammash's inclusion on the list.