The anti-war right
"What do you mean 'we' were wrong?"
Posted: March 20, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37669
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
Did you see David Kay's confession – "It turns out that we were all wrong" – before the Senate Armed Services Committee about a month ago?
Maybe you wondered who "we" were.
"We" certainly didn't include Kay's one-time boss at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix, who had come out of retirement to chair the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission.
"We" certainly didn't include Blix's successor at the IAEA – Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
So, what's this "we" stuff?
Well, you may remember David Kay's congressional testimony in the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Khidir Hamza frequently appeared with Kay.
You remember Hamza, don't you? The "defector" who claimed to have been in charge of the Iraqi nuke program? The author of "Saddam's Bombmaker"?
Hamza was also a sidekick of Richard Perle – then chairman of the Defense Policy Board – who vouched for Hamza's authenticity to congressional and administration pooh-bahs.
The Hamza-Kay-Perle testimony was that the Iraqis were secretly reconstituting the nuke program the IAEA had reported totally destroyed. Iraq would have several nukes in a matter of months, not years, and would likely give them to terrorists. The only way to prevent you soccer moms from getting nuked in your jammies was an immediate pre-emptive invasion of Iraq by the United States.
Now, the U.N. Security Council had been told back in 1998 that the IAEA had not only destroyed everything "nuclear" that had survived the Gulf War, but that:
There were no indications to suggest that Iraq was successful in its attempt to produce nuclear weapons.
There were no indications to suggest that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapons-grade nuclear material through its indigenous processes.
There were no indications that Iraq otherwise clandestinely acquired weapons-usable material.
There were no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapons-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.
Four years later, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, ElBaradei was able to assure the Security Council that there were no indications to suggest that Iraq had even attempted to reconstruct its nuclear programs, even for peaceful purposes.
The Hamza-Kay-Perle counter-testimony was that the IAEA under Blix and ElBaradei had been, and would always be, ineffective.
Well, now we know the IAEA had been effective in Iraq. The CIA didn't discover Saddam's secret nuke program in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The IAEA discovered it, totally destroyed it and the Iraqis never even attempted to reconstruct it.
So, the only question now is whether Hamza-Kay-Perle et al were simply wrong – or deliberately lied.
Well, there was never any doubt about Hamza.
You see, Gen. Hussein Kamal – Saddam's son-in-law – had defected to Jordan in 1995, carrying with him thousands of documents on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" program. Kamal was extensively interrogated by the CIA, and by Rolf Ekeus of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq and Maurizio Zifferero of the IAEA Action Team.
Basically, Kamal claimed all Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" and the makings thereof had been destroyed.
Ziffereo asked Kamal about Hamza, who was then representing himself to the CIA as having been in charge of Iraq's nuke program.
Quoth Kamal: "He is a professional liar."
As we now know, Kamal told the truth.
So, the CIA has known all along that Hamza was a fraud. Nevertheless, they allowed Hamza – and David Kay – to mislead Congress right up until the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Even when a genuine Iraqi nuke scientist – Imad Khadduri – exposed Hamza, the CIA and the media elite paid little attention.
According to Khadduri, Hamza "did not, even remotely, get involved in any scientific research – except for journalistic articles – dealing with the fission bomb, its components or its effects."
Hamza had been in Iraq's nuke program for a few months but was "kicked out of the program at the end of 1987 for stealing a few air-conditioning units from the building assigned to his project."
Hamza "retired from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market swindler and a shady business middleman."
Where is Hamza – the "professional liar" – now?
According to David Kay – who was until recently in charge of the CIA's hunt for those "weapons of mass destruction" that Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei correctly assured us didn't exist – Hamza is now in charge of the CIA's rehabilitation and retraining program for Iraq's former "nuke" scientists.
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Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.