Lt. Gen. Amir Saadi, one of 55 people on the U.S. Central Command's list of most-wanted Iraqi government officials, arranged his surrender with the help of Germany's ZDF television network. It filmed him leaving his Baghdad villa with his German wife, Helga, and presenting himself to a U.S. Army warrant officer, who escorted him away.
Saadi, who worked in the Iraqi chemical weapons program in the 1980s and 1990s under Hussein's son-in-law and last year became the main liaison with U.N. weapons inspectors, told the German network that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction -- a position he maintained before the war in his contacts with the U.N. inspections teams.
"He would know Iraq's chemical weapons program, since he lived with it," said Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, in a telephone interview yesterday. As late as March 19, the day before the war against Iraq started, Blix said, he received a letter from Saadi saying Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons.
"I was telling the truth, always telling the truth, never told anything but the truth, and time will bear me out, you will see," Saadi told ZDF. "There will be no difference after this war."
I really hope the Iraqi people remain free and sovereign. Otherwise, we really DID just kill a fuck of a lot of people for
absolutely no reason.