Iraqi scientist gave CIA information that should have prevented war
I have long suspected that the Bush regime decided to invade Iraq and then went about attempting to find evidence that supported the invasion and ignoring anything that didn't.
And now we have a report from an Iraqi engineer stating that he clearly told the Americans prior to the invasion that Iraq did not have WMD.
Saad Tawfiq tells of how his sister - an Iraqi living in the United States - was approached by the CIA as part of a plan to use Iraqi-Americans to find out the state of Saddam's WMD arsenal by approaching relatives who worked in the defence industry in Iraq.
So the CIA dispatched Tawfigs sister, Sawsan, to Iraq to visit her brother armed with a list of questions that the CIA were anxious to know the answers to.The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been keeping tabs on Iraq's arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States. The American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.
These people risked their lives to tell the truth, only for it to be dismissed by people who had already decided what that truth must be.The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA's questions, which he thought showed the depths of the agency's ignorance about country.
"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you have a program,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing,'" Tawfiq said. "She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no ...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."
According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.
"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!"
Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.
"Saad told me there was nothing left," she told AFP. "That everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned its nuclear program. And he begged me to explain all that back in the States.
"I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying."
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation says that, rather than being ignored, the information from people in Saddam's labs was actually being contradicted by "other sources":
"To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programs were continuing."By which I assume he means Ahmad Chalabi and others whom the Bush regime paid almost $49 million to mislead them through information passed to Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans.
Not that Chalabi has any regrets over what he has done:
Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.The truth is that the regime listened to exiles like Chalabi rather than Iraqi scientists like Tawfiq for the simple reason that Chalabi was telling them what they wanted to hear. It suited their purposes and confirmed what they already believed.
Many of us felt that way watching Powell's performance at the UN, knowing that the war was by that point inevitable; but we can comfort ourselves that, unlike Tawfiq, we hadn't risked our lives and the lives of our loved ones trying to warn them.When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 - and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.
"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
And now, hundreds of thousands of people lie dead, and the country of Iraq teeters on the edge of the abyss, because the Bush regime chose to believe exiles they were paying rather than the scientists that Saddam actually employed.
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