|
Saddam duped by own experts
28/09/2003 19:25 - (SA)
New York - Iraqi former leader Saddam Hussein may have been deceived by his own scientists, who opted not to tell him their work on weapons of mass destruction was not making great strides, Time magazine reports. Sources told Time that Western intelligence intercepted communications from Saddam that indicated he was taking a keen interest in the progress of ongoing WMD programmes.
A captain in Iraq's Special Security Organisation, the agency that was responsible for, among other things, the security of weapons sites, says no such arms were available."
"'Trust me,' he says, his eyes narrowed, as he sits in a back alley tea house in Tikrit, 'if we had them we would have used them, especially in the battle for the airport. We wanted them but didn't have any.'"
Citing interviews with former regime officials over the past three months, the magazine said Saddam's ex-officials "all make essentially the same claim: "That Iraq's once-massive unconventional weapons programme was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt."
Time also wrote that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove that the weapons were gone.
"The shell games Saddam played with UN inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems (missiles, air defences, radar) not biological or chemical programmes," the magazine reported.
However "Saddam himself ... may not have known what he actually had - or more to the point, didn't have."
- AFP
|
News
