Mother Jones Looks At A Legacy of Lies

Mother Jones has a good article examining the history of US lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Clinton administration, she reminds us, used the threat of WMDs to keep the UN sanctions in place despite growing opposition from humanitarian groups.

In retrospect, the key to the whole Iraqi WMD fiasco is Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's weapons industries. In 1995, Kamel fled Iraq "carrying crate-loads of secret documents on weapons of mass destruction". Here is what he told Western intelligence:

"'All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.' The destruction took place in the summer of 1991.

What about chemical weapons?

'I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons.'

An inspector inquired about anthrax. 'Were weapons and agents destroyed?'

'Nothing remained.'

How about the 819 Soviet-made missiles Iraq was known to have purchased in the 1980's?

'Not a single missile left, but they [kept] blueprints and molds for production. All missiles were destroyed.'

In other words, the defector who had been cited time after time, over eight years, by two presidents and their cabinets, as the source that proved Saddam was still hiding a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- that defector had actually said the opposite: Not only did the weapons not exist, they had been destroyed before Clinton was even elected. "