A little more info on the scientist Jafar Dhia Jafar, though it comes from an article by Seymour Hersh, not exactly a guy known for accuracy or unbiased reporting, but he does occasionally give up useful material:
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, (* My note: If he wasn't involved in WMD recently, why'd he run?)
and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates.
(* My note: I wonder if this large oil company had anything to do with the Oil for Food scandal?)
According to Hersh:
Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:
Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period.
(* My note: Well, except for those occasional finds no one talks about much because they aren't "stockpiles"... )
“The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”
(* My note: Jaffar apparetly is feining ignrance on "everything" being oil voucher bribes, not WMD info. It's not as if there was any cooperation going on, folks.)
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
Wow- they're that leaky and the CIA still didn't get much intel?
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons: Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
(* my note: It's not like they can be used for regional blackmail or anything... could they?)
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”
(* My note: Jaques Baute the Frenchman endoreses him? Heck, let's run him for President of the world.)
