portland imc - 2003.07.14 - Bu$h Cabal = LIARS + TRAITORS

Pretty convincing

14.Jul.2003 22:35

James

Here's a pretty convincing (partial?) account of what exactly happened to Iraq's WMD program, ripped from The New Republic. Pretty similar to other stories posted over the course of the past fiew months.

The whole story is available here

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030721&s=drogin072103, but I believe you need a subscription to view it.

"muthanna, iraq
Dr. Alaa Saeed is an affable man with a shy smile and a thinning thatch of wispy white hair above thick, gold-rimmed glasses. He wears short-sleeved white shirts and permanent-press gray slacks. He has the polite, self-effacing manner of a small-town pharmacist. You wouldn't suspect that the 51-year-old, British-trained chemist helped found and direct Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons program.

I met Saeed one recent morning in Baghdad as he and two-dozen other former Iraqi weapons scientists and military officials waited their turn to be questioned by "John," the head of an American interrogation team. The Americans refused to identify themselves or their agency. The British spooks, by contrast, were more polite. Saeed already had been grilled by "Miss Rebecca,'' who told him she came from MI-6, London's foreign intelligence service. After chatting a bit, I invited Saeed to lunch. We met twice that week for coffee, and ultimately I asked him to take me to his former workplace.

The next day, we drove 60 miles northwest to the Muthanna State Establishment. Muthanna was built by a French company in 1978, ostensibly as a pesticide plant. Instead, Muthanna became the heart of Saddam's chemical weapons program. By the mid-'80s, more than 1,000 people were secretly producing thousands of tons of nerve and blister agents at Muthanna, as well as running a pilot anthrax and botulinum biowarfare project. The secret was not well-kept. Muthanna was heavily bombed in the 1991 Gulf war and was literally the first stop for U.N. inspectors sent to Iraq after the 1991 cease-fire to supervise what they expected to be a brief disarmament effort.

Muthanna is desolate now. Portions remain of the front gate, an arched pair of yellow concrete scimitars, but garish murals of Saddam have been destroyed. Empty roads shimmer in the furnace-like heat, and a few skinny trees somehow survive in the roadside grit. But mostly there is devastation. Saeed tells my driver to stop every few hundred yards so he can play tour guide. "This is P-7, the production plant for sarin and tabun," he says, getting out so we can climb through a heap of concrete slabs, broken tiles, and crumpled pipes. He points to another bombed-out ruin. "On the right is P-8, where we made mustard gas." We stop again, and he nods at a dun-colored building that was the "animal house" for donkeys, dogs, rabbits, rats, and guinea pigs. "We tied them up in inhalation chambers and released the agents," he explains. "Blood would run from their eyes, noses, and mouths, and they would convulse." Scientists, he says, were kept under the watchful eyes and guns of a secret police detachment camped next door.

Saeed first came to Muthanna in 1980 with a half-dozen other military scientists to set up Project 922, which was dedicated to the covert production of chemical weapons. With a master's degree in chemistry from the University of Baghdad and a membership card in Saddam's Baath Party, Saeed was appointed chief of quality control, responsible for certifying every production run. He already had served eight years in the army's chemical defense corps, which helped train and protect Iraqi soldiers against chemical attacks from Iran, Iraq's chief enemy at the time. Now he and his colleagues were on offense. Their first success was mustard gas, a World War I blister agent that causes debilitating injuries to the eyes, lungs, and skin. After a few test runs, Muthanna soon was churning out 900 tons of mustard gas per year. Then, in 1983, Saeed and his colleagues began producing more lethal nerve agents--first tabun, then sarin and cyclosarin, which are absorbed through the skin or respiratory tract and can cause death within a few minutes. The purity of the nerve agents varied widely, but Iraq used thousands of chemical-filled bombs, rockets, and artillery shells during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. U.N. investigators estimated they caused up to 80,000 Iranian casualties. Baghdad also used Muthanna's blister and nerve agents against Kurds in northern Iraq. Saeed left Muthanna for three years in 1985 to get a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in England. He liked the dowdy seaside town of Brighton and briefly considered staying and joining a real estate firm there. "I was very tempted, but I have a big family--two sisters and six brothers--and [regime officials] told my parents, 'If your son does not return, we will kill you,'" he says.

When he got back in 1988, Muthanna was bustling. We drive down a gravel road so he can show me the rubble-filled site where he focused his work for the next three years. "We called this the Dhia'a Plant. It is where we made VX," Saeed says. VX, first developed by British scientists in the 1950s, paralyzes the nervous system and is dozens of times stronger than sarin. The four-stage VX production process is difficult, but the Muthanna scientists reverseengineered the recipe from a list of controlled chemicals issued by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. Saeed says he supervised production of his last two batches of liquid VX in April 1990 but that they failed to achieve his goal of 50 to 60 percent purity, and they deteriorated within a week. "It couldn't be used as a weapon," he insists.

Concerns about VX were central to the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) presented an imminent threat. In the early '90s, Iraqi officials repeatedly denied developing VX. After U.N. inspectors found proof of VX in 1995, Baghdad acknowledged producing 3.9 tons but insisted it was never deployed as a weapon. U.N. inspectors weren't so sure. In 1998, they found VX products in a missile warhead. More important, they warned that Iraq could still be hiding enough precursor chemicals to produce up to 200 tons of VX. Iraq consistently denied possessing those chemicals, however, and their existence was never proved. Saeed claims the VX dispute was based on a misunderstanding. In 1991, he says senior Iraqi officials ordered him to destroy his records and to deny producing VX in order to bring a quick end to U.N. inspections. He says he tried to tell the truth after 1995 but that his previous lies undermined his attempts to come clean. "When the U.N. inspectors first came, my superior told me, 'Because you did not succeed in producing VX, why tell them about it? It takes too much time. So forget about it.' I had to tear up or burn our documents. So we hid the VX program from 1991 to 1995. After that, of course, they did not believe us. But that is the real story."

The idea that Saddam did not secretly continue building chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons directly contradicts White House claims. But the Iraqi scientists I met insist that the combination of U.S. bombing, U.N. inspections, disarmament efforts, unilateral destruction by Iraqi officials, and stiff U.N. sanctions had indeed eliminated Saddam's illicit weapons by the mid-'90s. At the same time, however, Saddam's efforts to hide or destroy documents hindered efforts to ultimately resolve scores of questions about the disposition of missing materials and equipment. In addition, fear of Saddam kept many scientists from telling the dictator the truth about their WMD programs. Ultimately, the scientists and others say, Saddam may have feared that admitting his WMD were gone would have shown a weakness that could have threatened his hold on power. These overlapping theories may not fully explain why American forces have not found WMD in Iraq. But, for now, they're the best we have."

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Bu$h Cabal = LIARS + TRAITORS