US Quietly Sacks Its Prize
Witness Against Saddam
By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent - UK
4-16-4
Once he was a prize witness before congressional committees, arguing
that the US must invade Iraq immediately because Saddam Hussein
possessed a fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Given a
top job in Baghdad after the war, he has now been quietly sacked by
the US authorities.
Khidir Hamza was the dissident Iraqi nuclear scientist who played an
important role persuading Americans to go to war in Iraq. His
credentials appeared impeccable because he claimed to have headed
Saddam's nuclear programme before defecting in 1994.
After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi
scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry
of Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional
Authority, he had partial control of Iraq's nuclear and military
industries.
It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the
ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others
from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the
CPA. It is now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily
guarded "Green Zone" where the CPA has its headquarters. He could not
be contacted by The Independent but is believed to have taken up a job
with a US company.
Dr Hamza's fall from grace with the US administration is in sharp
contrast with the seriousness with which it took his views on WMD
before the war. Speaking excellent English, he was also regularly
interviewed by US television and quoted by the press.
There were always doubts that Dr Hamza had been as central as he
claimed to Saddam's programme to develop a nuclear bomb. Dr Hussain
Shahristani, an Iraqi nuclear scientist, tortured and imprisoned under
Saddam for refusing to help build a nuclear device, said: "Hamza
really was only a minor figure in our nuclear programme and always
exaggerated his own importance when he got to the US."
Dr Hamza's own account of his career was that, after being educated in
the US, he had been working at Florida State University in 1969 when
he was approached by an Iraqi agent. He was told that unless he
returned to Iraq his family would be in danger. He came back and was
compelled to work for 20 years for Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission on
developing an atomic bomb. Deeply opposed to the project, he defected
to the US embassy in Hungary in 1994 and swiftly became a persuasive
expert witness, testifying as an Iraqi insider on how Saddam was
developing a terrifying arsenal. In the lead-up to the war he
proclaimed: "Saddam has a whole range of weapons of mass destruction,
nuclear, biological and chemical."
It was as if Dr Hamza had studied the agenda of the hawks in the US,
who wanted to invade Iraq, and was willing to supply evidence
supporting their arguments. Several other Iraqi defectors during the
1990s also produced information which they said proved Saddam was
secretly producing WMD, but Dr Hamza was the most convincing because
he was able to clothe his evidence in appropriate scientific jargon.
He wrote a book, Saddam's Bomb Maker: The Terrifying Inside Story of
the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda.
One employer in the US decided that his account of his past simply did
not stand up to examination but the US government stuck by him and
made him a consultant to the US Department of Energy. Dr Hamza also
hinted that Saddam had secret links to al-Qa'ida and might give them
anthrax.
Back in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam, Dr Hamza's position as a
senior advisor was very influential. The US-appointed advisors share
control over ministries with Iraqi ministers. The ministry was, among
other things, in charge of monitoring and securing the remains of
Iraq's nuclear industry.
Dr Hamza's life in Baghdad was not entirely happy. At first he lived
outside the Green Zone with his family until a remotely detonated bomb
exploded near his car on the morning of Christmas Eve, buckling the
doors and blowing out the windows.
He and his son were in the car at the time but were not injured. Dr
Hamza asked for and was given a house in the Green Zone. It is this
which the CPA is now trying to recover.
Of the Iraqi defectors after the Gulf War in 1991 who built a career
in the US by providing evidence that Saddam Hussein was covertly
building up an arsenal of WMD, Dr Hamza was the most successful. Once
the war was over and no WMD had been found, he was something of an
embarrassment, all the more so since he could not do his job.
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