Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist, 'enemy' of US

Why being right on WMD is no consolation to Iraqi scientist labelled enemy of America

Chief link to UN weapons inspectors held in solitary confinement for year

Jonathan Steele in Baghdad
Wednesday May 5, 2004
The Guardian

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.

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.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1209574,00.html

(snagged from Atrios etc)