Sabri A Spy
It turns out that former Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri was a spy for both the CIA and the French.
Publicly Sabri was insisting that Iraq had no prohibited weapons of mass destruction. Privately, the sources said, he provided information that the Iraqi dictator had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway.
When it came to chemical weapons, Sabri told his handler that some existed but they were not under military control, a former intelligence official familiar with the situation said. Another former official added: “He said he had been told Hussein had them dispersed among some of the loyal tribes.”
So much for the theory that Saddam didn’t have WMD’s. I’m not arguing that the CIA’s estimates were right. God knows they weren’t. But Sabri’s admission that chemical weapons have been dispersed to “some of the loyal tribes” is certainly credible. That’s troubling to say the least.
I’d want to know which tribes they were, whether they’d ever have contact with global terrorists, things like that. I suspect that locating them and destroying them was a high priority item for U.S. and Coalition forces.
The other thing that’s obvious from that information is that, while Saddam didn’t have large stockpiles of WMD’s, he certainly wanted to maintain production capabilities for them. Letting a tyrant like him even retain the capability in a post-9/11 world is insanity. Thankfully, that threat’s been eliminated.
In a speech in February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet referred to Sabri, although not by name, when he said the CIA had obtained information from “a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle.” Tenet said that source described Hussein as covertly seeking to get a nuclear weapon and having stockpiled chemical weapons while his scientists were only “dabbling” with biological weapons development with little success.
Technorati Tags: Naji Sabri, Saddam, WMD
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:25 am
Now that more and more evidence is surfacing that Saddam did have both weapons and ambition/programs to develop more, John Kerry can go flip back to his original opinion of Saddam. We just have to wait for the MSM and public opinion to recognize the news.