[Media-watch] America quietly sacks Khidir Hamza - independent - 17/04/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=512242

America quietly sacks its prize witness against Saddam
By Patrick Cockburn
17 April 2004

Once he was a prize witness before congressional committees, arguing that
the US must invade Iraq immediately because Saddam Hussein possessed a
fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Given a top job in Baghdad
after the war, he has now been quietly sacked by the US authorities.

Khidir Hamza was the dissident Iraqi nuclear scientist who played an
important role persuading Americans to go to war in Iraq. His credentials
appeared impeccable because he claimed to have headed Saddam's nuclear
programme before defecting in 1994.

After the war, Dr Hamza was rewarded, to the distress of many Iraqi
scientists, with a well-paid job as the senior advisor to the Ministry of
Science and Technology. Appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he
had partial control of Iraq's nuclear and military industries.

It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the
ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from
doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA. It is
now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily guarded "Green Zone"
where the CPA has its headquarters. He could not be contacted by The
Independent but is believed to have taken up a job with a US company.

Dr Hamza's fall from grace with the US administration is in sharp contrast
with the seriousness with which it took his views on WMD before the war.
Speaking excellent English, he was also regularly interviewed by US
television and quoted by the press.

There were always doubts that Dr Hamza had been as central as he claimed to
Saddam's programme to develop a nuclear bomb. Dr Hussain Shahristani, an
Iraqi nuclear scientist, tortured and imprisoned under Saddam for refusing
to help build a nuclear device, said: "Hamza really was only a minor figure
in our nuclear programme and always exaggerated his own importance when he
got to the US."

Dr Hamza's own account of his career was that, after being educated in the
US, he had been working at Florida State University in 1969 when he was
approached by an Iraqi agent. He was told that unless he returned to Iraq
his family would be in danger. He came back and was compelled to work for 20
years for Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission on developing an atomic bomb.
Deeply opposed to the project, he defected to the US embassy in Hungary in
1994 and swiftly became a persuasive expert witness, testifying as an Iraqi
insider on how Saddam was developing a terrifying arsenal. In the lead-up to
the war he proclaimed: "Saddam has a whole range of weapons of mass
destruction, nuclear, biological and chemical."

It was as if Dr Hamza had studied the agenda of the hawks in the US, who
wanted to invade Iraq, and was willing to supply evidence supporting their
arguments. Several other Iraqi defectors during the 1990s also produced
information which they said proved Saddam was secretly producing WMD, but Dr
Hamza was the most convincing because he was able to clothe his evidence in
appropriate scientific jargon. He wrote a book, Saddam's Bomb Maker: The
Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda.

One employer in the US decided that his account of his past simply did not
stand up to examination but the US government stuck by him and made him a
consultant to the US Department of Energy. Dr Hamza also hinted that Saddam
had secret links to al-Qa'ida and might give them anthrax.

Back in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam, Dr Hamza's position as a senior
advisor was very influential. The US-appointed advisors share control over
ministries with Iraqi ministers. The ministry was, among other things, in
charge of monitoring and securing the remains of Iraq's nuclear industry.

Dr Hamza's life in Baghdad was not entirely happy. At first he lived outside
the Green Zone with his family until a remotely detonated bomb exploded near
his car on the morning of Christmas Eve, buckling the doors and blowing out
the windows.

He and his son were in the car at the time but were not injured. Dr Hamza
asked for and was given a house in the Green Zone. It is this which the CPA
is now trying to recover.

Of the Iraqi defectors after the Gulf War in 1991 who built a career in the
US by providing evidence that Saddam Hussein was covertly building up an
arsenal of WMD, Dr Hamza was the most successful. Once the war was over and
no WMD had been found, he was something of an embarrassment, all the more so
since he could not do his job.