When I interviewed [.mp3] former US Marine and lie-debunking UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, last year, he got all bent out of shape when I brought up Iraqi General Hussein Kamal [at about 38:00]. Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, after which he was debriefed by the CIA, MI-6, IAEA, UNSCOM etc., and told them – with the paperwork to prove it – that Iraq had initially attempted to deceive the UN weapons inspectors after Operation Desert Storm™, still keeping some of their chemical munitions, but that he had personally overseen the destruction of every last bit of it by the end of 1991. (Kamal later went back to Iraq and was executed.)
According to Ritter, “this administration despises the American veteran, and this administration despises the men and women who wear the uniform,” as revealed by Cheney’s willingness to lie right to their face when he gave his speech to the VFW in Tennessee on August 26, 2002:
“Saddam Hussein had sought to frustrate and deceive [the inspectors] at every turn, and was often successful in doing so. I’ll cite one instance. During the spring of 1995, the inspectors were actually on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law suddenly defected and began sharing information. Within days the inspectors were led to an Iraqi chicken farm. Hidden there were boxes of documents and lots of evidence regarding Iraq’s most secret weapons programs.
That should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself. To the dismay of the inspectors, they in time discovered that Saddam had kept them largely in the dark about the extent of his program to mass produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals known to man. And far from having shut down Iraq’s prohibited missile programs, the inspectors found that Saddam had continued to test such missiles, almost literally under the noses of the U.N. inspectors.”
In ommitting the important details that all of this had been over for 9 years and had been completely fessed up to by the Iraqis for 7, Cheney lied to the VFW – a group of men who have fought in the wars of the past and were the most likely to have been sending their own grandsons off to kill and die under Cheney’s care.
According to Ritter, the Iraqi government had already confessed to everything and all Kamal did was confirm it. After he did so, Saddam Hussein, not knowing exactly what Kamal had given them, panicked, and dumped every last bit of paperwork he had in the UN’s lap.
The US government knew good and well since then that Hussein had no chemical weapons – nevermind the far-fetched forgery-based claim that Iraq was “reconstituting nuclear weapons.” As Ritter explained to me, and all over the place, the only reasons for the continued weapons inspections after 1995 was as a pretext to continue the sanctions, and to provide the CIA with opportunities to assassinate Saddam.
An even more egregious example of the contempt that the War Party holds for their expendeble toy soldiers – our friends, neighbors, kin and the grandsons of those men at the VFW – is the shocking, but quite overlooked finding in the big new poll of American troops in Iraq: 85% of them believe that they are in Iraq to get revenge for Saddam Hussein’s role in the attacks of September 11th. Eighty-five percent!
Who could possibly be giving them that impression?
The President of the United States denies that he or his administration have ever even implied such a thing:
“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”
So, who supports the troops then? We in the antiwar movement who want them home at their bases, doing nothing in safety, or our neighbors who believe any lie the state tells them and support the politicians’ decisions to send them off to a desert to die for nothing?
Update: The great Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution – one of my favorite blogs – wrote in to set me straight. I had it wrong when I said General Hussein Kamal had overseen the destruction of the last of Iraq’s chemical and biological (such as they were) munitions in 1993.
It was 1991. That is, within a year of the first Gulf War. The above text has been changed to reflect that fact.