You Don't Have to Destroy a Country For That

How angry would it make you to know that despite your best efforts and uncompromised testimony someone destroyed your home believing you to be hiding contraband. How angry would you be if they did it to your whole town? What about your whole country?

The Daily Star reports that Saad Tawfiq, one of Saddam’s known leading scientists, told the CIA in no uncertain terms as early as 2002 that Saddam Hussein no longer had any WMDs or WMD programs.

Via his sister, who was approached by the CIA, Tawfiq replied to twenty questions about Iraq’s weapons systems and capabilities.

'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing,'" Tawfiq said. "She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no ...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."

But the CIA chose to ignore Saad and instead go with the evidence provided by an unemployed taxi driver who was code named curveball. On his testimony, Colin Powell went before the United Nations and gave the world the show the Neocons wanted.

Tawfiq saw the Colin Powell extravaganza.

"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The CIA said that Saad Tawfiq’s reports were not ignored but were contradicted, so that there was a chance that he was not telling the truth. So the Bush administration was told in no uncertain terms by a leading Iraqi scientist that Saddam’s WMDs had all been destroyed and yet they decided nonetheless to invade Iraq. I don’t find that acceptable even if there was a chance that some programs had not been stopped. As Saad Tawfiq himself says:

"You don't have to destroy a country for that."



It’s so clear that Bush and his Administration are simply war criminals and on this day, this super Tuesday, I can only hope that this country will be given a chance to right the wrongs of the past Neocon regime in the upcoming election.