Hussein Kamel

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Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid (Arabic: حسين كامل حسن الماجد) (died February 23, 1996) was the son-in-law and second cousin of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He defected to Jordan and took to helping the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA inspection teams assigned to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Kamel rose through the army ranks to become Iraq's minister of military industries, heading the Military Industrialisation Commission and supervising Iraq's weapons development programs from 1987.

He married one of Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghad Hussein, and lived in Iraq until 1995. On August 7 of that year, Kamel and his wife defected from Iraq, along with Kamel's brother, Col. Saddam Kamel al-Majid, and the brother's wife, another of Saddam Hussein's daughters. In a September 21, 1995 interview with CNN, Hussein Kamel explained:

This is what made me leave the country, the fact that Saddam Hussein surrounds himself with inefficient ministers and advisers who are not chosen for their competence but according to the whims of the Iraqi president. And as a result of this the whole of Iraq is suffering. [1]

Jordan granted asylum to the Kamels, and there they began to cooperate with UNSCOM and its director Rolf Ekéus, the United States' CIA and the British MI6. Kamel provided the inspection teams with a wealth of information (including the fact that Ekeus's own translator was actually working for the Iraqi government). Kamel disclosed for the first time the fact that Iraq had a biological warfare program prior to the Gulf War, providing locations for facilities and huge amounts of documents. In a January 25, 1999 report to the U.N. Security Council, UNSCOM declared that the history of the Iraqi weapons inspections "must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel."

The defection appears to have had a psychological impact in Baghdad due to uncertainty over what Kamel would reveal: soon afterwards, inspectors were invited to visit previously unseen weapons sites and new documents were turned over for examination.

Importantly, Kamel maintained that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction and related programs after the end of the first Gulf War. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed." [2] Britain's Foreign Office has stated that they disbelieved this claim, while a March 3, 2003 Newsweek report said that Kamel's revelations were "hushed up" because inspectors "hoped to bluff Saddam [Hussein] into revealing still more." [3] Kamel's version of events appear to have been borne out in the wake of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

In February 1996, after intermediaries for Saddam Hussein had assured them that all would be forgiven, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel were convinced to return to Iraq with their wives. Reportedly, immediately upon their return, they were ordered to divorce their wives and were denounced as traitors. Three days after their arrival, on February 23, they refused to surrender to Saddam's security forces and were killed in a 13-hour firefight at a safe house.[citation needed]

In the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Bush administration figures--including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell--repeatedly cited Kamel's testimony as evidence that Iraq had produced unconventional weapons, without mentioning that, according to Kamel, all such weapons had been destroyed. [4]

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