Posted on 04/13/2003 5:55:01 PM PDT by MadIvan
One of Iraq's top nuclear scientists has surrendered, the US said last night, in another bonus for the coalition as it attempts to locate Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
The surrender of Jaffar al Jaffar followed that of Saddam's most senior scientific adviser, Lt Gen Amer al-Saadi, in Baghdad over the weekend. Jaffar had turned himself in over the past few days in Iraq, a US official announced yesterday on condition of anonymity.
He added that Jaffar "certainly would know about locations of nuclear-related facilities, and also would know a lot of people associated with Iraq's nuclear program, as well as likely other aspects of the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programme".
"Hopefully he will be more forthcoming and candid than he has been to date." Al-Saadi, an expert on chemical and biological weapons, was being interrogated yesterday after handing himself over in front of the crew of a German television station.
In the television interview before he was taken away, Al-Saadi, the former head of the ministry of military industrialisation, maintained that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
However, an American intelligence source in Baghdad said Al-Saadi was expected to know where weapons were hidden, how many of each type were produced and the possible whereabouts of Iraqi weapons scientists.
Ewen Buchan, spokesman for the UN inspections team, said: "He's a really big fish. But who knows whether he will tell them anything, or just stick to his guns."
There have been no confirmed discoveries of WMD in Iraq so far, despite American and British assertions that they exist. US marines yesterday said they had discovered 278 artillery shells in a school yard that contained substances that tested positive for chemical agents, but further analysis was needed.
He can be Operation Paperclip-ed. We need him and it's perfectly publicly acceptable to give him something close to asylum. I doubt he's going to end up in a War Crimes court. But we can't let Saddam, Uday, Qusay and Aziz off the hook, so any deal would give them a different status. If there is a deal then they must either disappear forever (not on the loose, of course), or they must show up somewhere where we would have a face-saving excuse for not insisting on their extradition. Everything will be much easier once we have cleaned up in Iraq -- the benefits will be so great, any bad aftertaste caused by Saddam showing up in, say, Belarus, will be quickly forgotten. But, if that is the scheme, it would have to be finessed. I don't doubt that it could be managed, though.
Taha is Dr. Germ. The other is Mrs. Anthrax. I don't remember what Mrs. Anthrax's real name is, but she was the woman visible in the b&w video of Saddam and cronies that was shown on Iraqi tv a couple of weeks ago.
Well, I don't know anything about these guys, but maybe they just don't have the personality to accept hiding underground for much of the rest of their lives. They probably also figure that they'll live a much more comfortable life after surrendering to the Americans than they would under any other scenario. They'll have to spill some of the beans, of course.
I don't think this implies any sort of deal with Saddam. It's the kind of thing you would expect to happen anyway.
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