''Khidhir Hamza: The bogus intelligence source''
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 @ 00:15:36 CST
By Imad
Khadduri
Former Iraqi nuclear scientist
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (
(YellowTimes.org) -- Belatedly,
in a September 29, 2003 article in the New York Times by Douglas Jehl, the Defense Intelligence
Agency has awkwardly admitted that most of the intelligence and information
offered by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for the past several years, which
was provided by Iraqi defectors of questionable credibility, was of little to
no value, all at a cost of $150 billion, more than 300 dead American soldiers,
and at least 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians.
A prominent and callous epithet
of such defectors mentioned in the above article is Khidhir
Hamza, the self-claimed Iraqi atomic "Bomb
Maker." Given a short lived assignment in the Iraqi nuclear program in
1987 to lead the atomic bomb design team, he was kicked out a few months later
for petty theft. Reduced to a non-entity in the accelerated nuclear weapons
program between 1987 and the start of the 1991 war, he retired from the Iraqi
Atomic Energy Commission in 1989 and became a college lecturer, a stock market
swindler and a shady business middle-man.
Upon his escape from
Seeking refuge as a lecturer in
Panicking after his son's arrival
to
Only when Hussain
Kamel, the man in charge of all weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) work and research in Iraq since the late eighties, had
escaped to Jordan in August 1995 and informed the IAEA about his efforts to
hide the scientific reports on WMD research in his chicken farm, did the CIA
feel that Hamza would be useful to them and then
nestled him to their bosom.
Once settled, Hamza
went into hyperspin, giving interviews, writing a
book, appearing on TV talk shows and speaking before congressional committees
forwarding the premise that
His false claims are dealt with
in detail in my recently published book, "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage,"
and in an article "Saddam's
bomb maker is full of lies" that was published on November 27,
2002 and is also included in the above mentioned site.
He kept up his barrage, in a CNN
interview, until the last week before the occupation of
He is at present aiding the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in the handling of Iraqi nuclear scientists and
engineers. Several of them have been interned for having come forward with
their meager information while others are being
refused their passports to leave
Strangely, none of the American
media that fell over themselves in the past few years by hosting Hamza for his hyperbolic lies about
Lest the American media have lost
their sense of accountability, others have not.
[Imad
Khadduri has a MSc in Physics from the
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