|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Saturday, December 07, 2002“I first met her in New York in late 1992 or early 1993,” says Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspection effort until 1997. Several Iraqi officials had been invited to explain their research efforts, and Taha was among them. “She was very, very smart,” Ekeus recalls. “She made a big show on a blackboard of how much she could have produced with what she had, and it was only a few grams.” So persuasive was Taha, in fact, and so thin was the available evidence, that Ekeus says he was “quite skeptical about the existence of a biological program.” Then the U.N. scientists crunched Taha’s numbers, and confronted her with their findings at the next meeting in Baghdad. “She made a big scene, crying and slamming down her fists and running out the door and slamming it,” the courtly Swedish diplomat recalls. “The other Iraqis looked at us like we were not gentlemen.” Then, when the inspectors returned with evidence that she was lying: “It was a strange feeling when she was admitting she did all the production,” recalled Kraatz-Wadsack. “She was smiling, a nice person. You had the sense she was proud that she had done what no one imagined she could do. She was just as pleasant telling us how she did all this, where things were stored, as she was when she was lying to us about the single-cell proteins.” posted by Sydney on 12/07/2002 07:24:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
