>Monday, July 04, 2005
Speaker: Patricia Wald, chair, Open Society Institute Criminal Justice Initiative; commissioner, Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction
Speaker: Charles Duelfer [Canadian], former deputy executive chairman, U.N. Special Commission on Iraq [UNSCOM]; former special adviser to the director of central intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; former head, Iraq Survey Group
Presider: Craig R. Whitney, assistant managing editor, the New York Times; editor: The WMD Mirage: Iraq's Decade of Deception and America's False Premise for War
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"QUESTIONER: Gary Sick, Columbia University. I, as somebody who was watching this very much from the outside, have been struck by two different data points that I have not heard discussed very much in any of the reports, and I have not read both of your reports in great detail. One is Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected [in 1995], was debriefed at great length and who said, "Here is where the stuff was hidden," and so forth, but then at the end of his discussion said, "But of course that's all over. We did away with that years ago and that's not--that's not going on in Iraq." The first part of this report got a lot of attention; the second one was largely ignored.
The second one was a fellow who was a close adviser on the nuclear side, who went on to Canada--actually escaped from Saddam, went off to Canada and while--and he was very quiet for a long time because he was scared, but then as he saw war coming he actually went public and said, you know, "I was very close to the nuclear side and nothing was going on there. This was over for years." Now, that we paid a lot of attention not only to the Curve Balls, but we also to--the Saddam's bomb-maker and people like that, who got a tremendous amount of attention. Both of these reports, which were available at great length, I am wondering what the--how they were perceived inside the community and if they got any attention at all. I'm told that the fellow in Canada didn't--I'm sorry, his name escapes me--was never even interviewed by the CIA.
WHITNEY: Charles, do you want to take a whack at that?
DUELFER: Well, they're two different cases. The Hussein Kamel one--his presentation was a bit more mixed than you are suggesting. I mean, he described things which we did not know about at the time and so there is clearly, based on that conversation, things which Iraq was still hiding at least factually from the UN inspectors and obviously from the U.S. So, you know, it's--again, it is this mutual mistrust and if they're hiding--why would they hide that if they were trying preserve the capability or retain something? You know, that was one of the fascinating experiences to me, because I sat down--I mean, these are people I have known for over a decade and, you know, you kind of can have some conversations while they are in custody. You know, what were you doing when we were doing this? But there really was this element of mutual misunderstanding.
And the second fellow, whose name is Imad Khadduri, he was involved in the nuclear program but more as a--he collected documentation. And yes, he went to Canada. I mean, there were a lot of Iraqis who left Iraq who had more or less something to say. The fact that he said that the nuclear program had ended--you know, I don't how you would agree to that, but it does point to one of, I think, the systemic problems in the intelligence committee, which they are now thinking about: How do you account for negative information? The system--you know, if you have a 100 people in the day who say, you know, "I was driving in Baghdad and I didn't see anything," it doesn't make it to the president's desk. It's just a--it's unnatural. I mean that, you know, nothing is happening, so you are going to report that to the president? (emphasis added)
But you if you do get a guy, you know, who says something is going on, then that attracts attention. I don't know, is it--part of it is human nature and part of it's a systemic problem."
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Iraq (The extract above is near the end of the session)
With such dead-ended logic, I would venture to assume that Duelfer has dual citizenship, American-Canadian, and not Canadian-American.
Now then, naturally, something is happening!
One would assume that the consequences are now being reported to the president.
Not that the "Bring 'em On" president does give a damn, then or now.
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