By any measure Amer al-Saadi ought to feel vindicated. The dapper British-educated scientist who was the Iraqi government's main link to the United Nations inspectors before the US invasion repeatedly insisted that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction years earlier.If Dr Saadi has to wait for President Bush to declare that the war is over to be freed, he may never get out of prison. How can this be just?
David Kay, the American inspector who headed the Iraq Survey Group and was sure he would find such weapons when he went to Iraq after the war, now accepts Dr Saadi was right. So does Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, who up to a month before the war still thought Iraq might have had WMD.
Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot.
Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television.
[snip]
Barely three days after the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by US troops in central Baghdad Dr Saadi approached the Americans and became the first senior Iraqi to hand himself in. It was the last time his wife saw him.
He was sure he would soon be released, Mrs Saadi says. He was a scientist who had never been part of Saddam's terror apparatus, or even a member of the Ba'ath party.
CIA interrogators have repeatedly interviewed him. Had there been any WMD to discover Dr Saadi would have had an obvious incentive to reveal their location once the regime had collapsed. But from the reports of the Iraq Survey Group it can only be assumed that he has maintained his line that they were eliminated long ago.
Dr Saadi is described officially by the Americans as an "enemy prisoner of war". This allows them to detain him indefinitely without access to a lawyer or visiting rights from his family until George Bush declares the war to be over. Whether he is still held out of spite or to hide Washington's embarrassment is not clear. He has already been in custody for more than a year.
His CIA interrogators have finished their work and apparently feel awkward about his continued detention.
"My handlers have appealed to higher authorities for my release but it seems it's political and God doesn't meddle in politics," Dr Saadi wrote in one letter.
Dr Saadi was the liaison man with the UN weapons inspectors when they went back to work in November 2002.
At the UN in February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Dr Saadi did not cooperate with the inspectors; instead his job was to "deceive; not to disarm, but to undermine the inspectors; not to support them, but to frustrate them and to make sure they learn nothing."
Of course, now we know that most of Powell's presentation to the UN was BS. But Dr. Saadi will rot in prison because the Bush administration can not admit it was wrong about anything.
Can anyone tell me why President Bush should be re-elected? He is an idiot.
