Hushing up weapons' destruction

The Scotsman reports:

The highest-ranking defector ever to turn informant on Saddam Hussein’s government told United Nations weapons inspectors in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks after the Gulf war.

But UN inspectors hushed up that part of Hussein Kamel’s story - which he also told to debriefers from British and United States intelligence - because they wanted to keep the pressure on Iraq to tell more.

The revelation, reported in the US magazine Newsweek, raises new questions over claims by the US and Britain that Iraq has failed to account for vast stores of chemical and biological weapons.

Of the thousands of chemical bombs and thousands of litres of deadly anthrax said to have gone mysteriously missing inside Iraq, most date back to before 1991.

Iraq has long claimed to have destroyed the weapons "unilaterally", but a regime hardly famous for its honesty and openness is accused of failing to provide hard evidence.

However "the defector’s tale raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist" Newsweek reported.

Scott Ritter's assertion that the vast majority (90-95%) of Iraq's WMDs were destroyed as of December 1998 (prior to Desert Fox) lends some support to Kamel's claims. Both stories do not necessarily mean that Iraq is clean now, but they do indicate that proper UN pressure and inspections can be successful at containing Iraq and getting rid of its nasty stuff. If the war drums stopped, the process could likely reap benefits once again.

This is, however, the last thing Washington wants.

Not surprisingly, the media is largely ignoring this story, while at the same bending over backwards to air White House propaganda.