« Oh! Oh! I wanna go!! I wanna go! | Main | More intelligence problems »

July 31, 2003

No leads from Iraqi scientists, yet

Well, despite months of predictions that once we were able to start talking to the scientists without their minders and with Saddam out of office, they'd be able to tell us a lot about Iraq's WMDs (more recently, they've modified that claim to WMD claims, since they seem to have realized that there's most likely no actual WMDs to be found), but so far, the scientists haven't been able to tell them a thing.

The sources said four senior scientists and more than a dozen at lower levels who worked for the Iraqi government have been interviewed by U.S. officials under the direction of the CIA. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq.

No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi officials questioned the significance of evidence cited by the Bush administration to suggest that Hussein was stepping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruction programs.

The scientists have also maintained that the disputed aluminum tubes were for use in rockets, not enriching uranium. This, despite the fact that we've been using more aggressive techniques to try and get information, such as long detention and solitary confinement, even for scientists who have voluntarily come in to speak with officials.

Amir Saadi, Iraq’s 65-year-old chief liaison with United Nations weapons inspectors since last year, has been held incommunicado since his voluntary surrender in Baghdad to U.S. military police more than three months ago, according to his wife, Helma.

The night before he gave himself up, Saadi saw himself listed on BBC satellite television as one of the men being sought by U.S. forces. In a recent interview at her home in Baghdad, Helma Saadi said that he told her, “I want to surrender. I want to cooperate. It will be just a matter of a few hours, and I’ll be back.’

Just hours before his April 12 surrender, Saadi gave a television interview to a German television reporter during which he said, “There were no weapons of mass destruction, and time will bear me out.” [...]

Saadi’s surrender encouraged the wife and daughter of Gen. Hossam Amin, head of Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate, to get him to surrender, and he, too, has not been heard from since, Helma Saadi said.

[...] His wife said she suspects her husband is being held out of sight because “he is telling the truth . . . They have realized there are no weapons of mass destruction and the quagmire they have created. They want to hold someone as a scapegoat.”

After hiring a lawyer, Helma Saadi sent a written request to L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq. She did not receive an answer from Bremer to that letter or to one sent more recently. She did receive a response to a letter she sent asking whether her husband could be represented by a lawyer. On June 27, Col. Marc L. Warren of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps assigned to Bremer’s office, said her husband’s status “is being investigated” under the Geneva Conventions to see whether he is entitled to prisoner of war status or some other category.

Meanwhile, former government officials, scientists and professionals are still being arrested.

Helma says she has received only one letter from her husband since he surrendered, and that was written when the Red Cross visited him to ensure he was being treated properly. He commented in his letter that it was "nice to have someone to talk to", leading his wife to believe he's being held in solitary confinement. She also said that he did not work with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but instead worked on building rockets. Apparently, US officials believe he might know something about what (if anything) Saddam was working on regarding chemical weapons, and are continuing to try and get that information from him. Helma says he has no such information to give them.

My question, though, is if we're going to do things like long-term detention and solitary confinement in order to try and "motivate" people to give us information on Saddam's alleged weapons programs, how are we ever going to know that the scientists are telling us the truth, especially if the absence of evidence to support any contetion that Saddam had WMD?

Of course, that question pre-supposes that they actually care about getting the truth, and right now it's hard to say if the administration does or not. They might be perfectly content to get phoney confessions to involvement in WMDs if they think it will bolster their case - and the President's flagging approval ratings.

I know that we have to put some effort into getting information from some of these people, for whom their previous lives under Saddam have made keeping secrets a matter of life and death. But using coercive techniques such as indefinate detention in solitary confinement, or, as reported the other day, kidnapping someone's wife and child to get them to come in, refusing to allow someone to turn themselves in and then breaking down the door to their home and arresting them under cover from a helicopter (and leaving his sons behind in plastic handcuffs), does nothing to ensure that the information we receive is in any way true.

Posted by thorswitch at July 31, 2003 01:07 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.differentstrings.info/mt/mt-tb-ds.cgi/1002

Comments

Posted by: Seb at July 31, 2003 09:35 AM