[Peace-discuss] Saddam's science advisor denies WMDs

[patton paul]

Saddam's Science Aide Surrenders to U.S.
By HAMZA HENDAWI

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Saddam Hussein's science adviser surrendered to U.S.
military authorities Saturday, becoming the first of the 55 most wanted
Iraqi figures to go into coalition custody. He insisted that Iraq had no
weapons of mass destruction and that the war was unjustified.

Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi arranged his surrender with the help of Germany's
ZDF television network, which filmed him leaving his Baghdad villa with
his German wife, Helga, and presenting himself to an American warrant
officer, who escorted him away.

Al-Saadi told ZDF he had spent the war in his cellar and emerged after he
saw a British TV report that he was being sought. He said he had no
information on what happened to Saddam and repeated his assertion, made
often in news conferences before the U.S.-led invasion, that Iraq was free
of weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. Central Command in Qatar confirmed in a statement that al-Saadi
surrendered to coalition forces Saturday.

The elegant, British-educated al-Saadi is believed to be the first of the
55 regime figures sought by the coalition - he was the seven of diamonds
in the deck of playing cards issued by the U.S. military with the wanted
officials' pictures - to enter custody.

He had been wanted because he was a special weapons adviser to Saddam and
oversaw Iraq's chemical program in the past. He is believed to have
in-depth knowledge of other weapons program as well.

He was among the key figures who worked with U.N. weapons inspectors and
often spoke for the Iraqi government in news conferences between the
resumption of inspections in November and their end last month.

After Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security
Council in February, al-Saadi suggested that monitored Iraqi conversations
Powell played were fabricated, that defector informants were unreliable,
and that satellite photographs ``proved nothing.''

Al-Saadi had also defended the regime's longtime practice of insisting
that Iraqi officials be present during meetings between U.N. weapons
inspectors and Iraqi scientists, saying that otherwise the scientists'
remarks might be distorted.

``I know the programs for weapons of mass destruction and have always told
the truth about these old programs, and only the truth. You will see, the
future will show it, and nothing else will come out after the end of the
war,'' he said in an interview with ZDF, according to the broadcaster's
German translation.

``Because I know the program, together with my colleagues, because we have
always worked together and nobody intervened. Nobody ever told me what I
should say.''