Iraqi dissident: Saddam has no nukes, but...

Saddam Hussein has no nuclear arms, but is hiding thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons ingredients. So swears an Iraqi nuclear chemist whom the despot had tortured and jailed for 11 years for refusing to help make an atom bomb.

Dr. Hussain Al-Shahristani, once the chief adviser of Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission, told The STAR in an exclusive interview that Allied bombers and UN inspectors effectively had destroyed all of Saddam’s nuclear facilities and components from 1991 to 1995. He insisted, though, that Saddam has yet to account for tons of mustard gas, tabun and sarin – nerve agents that Iraq used in its eight-year war with Iran in the ’80s.

Upon his defeat in the Gulf war of 1991, Saddam admitted to buying 3,080 tons of mustard gas, 250 tons of tabun and 812 tons of sarin from Western firms. UN inspectors discovered and destroyed only 600 tons of mustard gas, 30 of tabun and 70 of sarin before Saddam expelled them in 1998. New inspectors led by Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency chief Moha-med AlBaradei have yet to find the balance. Shahristani said Saddam continues to use the chemical weapons on Iraqi dissidents, mainly Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south and east.

Shahristani is more worried about the lethal VX nerve agent that Saddam was able to buy from the West in 1987-88, after the UN declared him in breach of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical weapons. He said Saddam produced 250 tons of VX, none of which past or present UN teams have found. One-ml of VX is enough to kill a human, Shahristani warned.

Shahristani would not comment on evidence presented last week by US State Secretary Colin Powell to the UN Security Council about nuclear weapons possibly in Saddam’s hands. He explained, though, that Saddam never completed his nuclear program. "Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 in the belief that in a few months he would have the bomb and then the world could do nothing," Shahristani said. "They were very close, but Saddam was wrong." He noted that despite Blix and AlBaradei’s presence, Saddam was able to import last month 280 missile engines, to which chemical and biological warheads can be installed.

Now the head of the Iraqi Refugee Aid Council (IRAC), Shahristani also doubted reports of close ties between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda Islamic extremists. "Saddam, as Baathist party chief, hates even moderate Islamic religionists," Shahristani said. "He has destroyed many mosques in Iraq to suppress Shiite schools, so the al-Qaeda is unlikely to deal with him." The scientist nonetheless called for UN help to depose Saddam "so that Iraq can rebuild democracy."

The Asian Institute of Management invited Shahristani to speak to Manila executives about Saddam’s arms and atrocities. He was scheduled to meet with US embassy officials yesterday.

Iraqi secret police arrested Shahristani in 1979 at Tuwaitha, Iraq’s atomic research center, on suspicion of helping sabotage nuclear energy materials it was then buying from France. Confessing to nothing despite severe daily beatings, he was sent to solitary confinement until Sept. the next year, when Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Tikriti tried to persuade him into building a nuclear bomb. Shahristani refused, and Saddam had him thrown to Baghdad’s infamous Abu Graib torture prison. In the confusion from Allied bombings in Feb. 1991, he managed to escape. A prison trustee who had befriended him whisked him out of his cell one night, dressed him in police garb, and pretended to be his driver as they sped out in an officer’s car. Saddam has since been after him with assassins, insulted by the manner of his escape. Shahristani first fled with his Canadian wife and three children to Iraq’s Kurdistan region, and then to Iran. After assisting refugee camps for five years at the Iraq-Iran border, he set up IRAC in London for funding. At 60, he is a living testament to Saddam’s brutality against his own people.

"I knew him well," Shahristani explained his refusal to make the bomb. "I knew all his weapons would be used against the Iraqi people."

Apart from the nerve gas that Saddam used to kill 60,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians in the ’80s and 27,000 Iraqi dissidents, Shahristani said, the despot has yet to show proof that he truly destroyed his biological weapons. Iraq has anti-personnel and anti-crop agents. Saddam admitted to producing and fitting into munitions:

• 19,000 liters of concentrated botulinum, which causes acute muscular paralysis and death within days;

• 8,500 liters of concentrated anthrax, a bacteria that kills within days to weeks after ingestion or inhalation;

• 2,200 liters of concentrated aflatoxin, which causes liver cancer;

• gas gangrene, which eats into the skin and causes rotting of flesh;

• ricin, a castor bean derivative that chokes blood circulation; and

• wheat smut, a moldy growth that can destroy vast firleds of wheat.

When past inspectors demanded proof of destruction, Saddam gave none. They neutralized only five of 40 known germ-warfare laboratories.

Saddam first went for a nuclear bomb by transforming the Tuwaitha atomic energy center into weapons research. Israel got wind of it and bombed the institute in 1981.

Jafar Dhia Jafar, once Shahristani’s closest friend at Tuwaitha and fellow-prisoner at Graib, led the rebuilding of a new facility at Tarmiya. Called Petrochemical 3 for disguise, it was in a complex of 50 buildings on three square kms of desert. US spy satellites completely missed to identify it as a weapons site for bombing in 1991. Rehabilitated as deputy head of atomic research and minister of industrialization, Jafar slyly avoided the most advanced nuclear technology using plutonium. Instead he mined uranium in the eastern desert and bought stocks from Germany and France at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. He copied the researches of the Manhattan Project, openly available in libraries, whose outputs were the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Parallel facilities were put up at Al Atheer, Al Furat, Rashdiya and Taji to design and produce missiles for enriched fissile uranium. Allied jets blasted these at the height of the Gulf war. The UN destroyed the Tarmiya complex soon afterwards.

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