8/7/1995

“On the night of August 7, 1995, Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, fled Baghdad [Iraq] and sought asylum in Jordan. Two weeks later, he sat down in an Amman villa with senior U.N. inspectors who had spent years trying to ferret out details of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Now they had the ultimate source, one who had no reason to lie. Kamel had been the second most powerful man in Iraq until he fled in fear of Saddam’s psychopathic son Uday. More important, he had been directly in charge of all military industry. The key question…was the location and quantity of Saddam’s remaining stocks of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. There were none, he replied, none at all. In 1991, following some initial successes by the inspectors, on Saddam’s instructions he had ‘ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons–biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed’ and the programs for producing them had been dismantled. He told exactly the same story to the CIA and Britain’s MI6 [foreign intelligence service].”

 – Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld, Pages 145-146