Iraq, the name alone makes many of us sad and angry at the same time. We are sad for all the American lives that have been lost in a distant country that we really had no business interfering with. We also feel bad for all the civilians in that country that have been killed, wounded and have seen their loved ones killed. As the war rages on in that country and make no mistake it is a war even though it has not been declared as such, we find out more and more about how the American public was duped into getting into that conflict. Just recently there was a news story that spoke of documents being forged that showed that there were weapons of mass destruction in that country. I think that history is going to be very harsh on the Bush administration for getting us into this mess, but I guess we will just have to wait and see. It is bad enough that we are there, but we are going to get to the point were the Iraqis will want us out and will not take no for an answer and someday we might even be fighting them, unless something is done.

So why did I bring all this stuff up again? Shouldn't I know that not many people are interested in it and are tired of hearing about it? I have brought this up because of a man named Saad Tawfiq. Please don't scratch you collective heads trying to figure out who this guy is, because I am sure that you have never heard of him. He is an Iraqi and not even a famous one at that. Saad was one of the most promising of all the engineers in Iraq and one of Saddam Hussein's  favorites in the field. Anyone that has followed the career of Saddam Hussein must realize what a devil the man was. He would think nothing of killing you and even wiping out your entire family. I am telling you this to illustrate what a chance someone would be taking that did anything that Saddam considered against his interests. We have to remember that Saddam used to be a hit man for his party and took part in several assassinations and attempted assassinations.

Saad Tawfig was a very brave man, not only was he brave, but he was very intelligent. He knew what a despot Saddam Hussein was and he was determined to help the people of Iraq. He looked around at his options, trying to figure out what the best course would be, the course that would be the most helpful to Iraq. After checking out all these options, he decided that there was only one course of action that he could take. Unfortunately for him, he made the wrong choice, the choice that led to endangering his family and friends and destroying the country that he loved so much. So what was it that Saad Tawfig did that caused all this chaos? He decided to be an informant for the CIA. He was in a perfect position to know that Saddam Hussein had discontinued his nuclear program, along with his chemical and biological programs. He wanted the U.S. to know this, I can't say for sure, but I guess that he had an idea that we would have attacked the country in the near future, because we feared those types of weapons in the hands of Saddam. He must have been confident that he did his job well when he got this info to us.

When Colin Powell went to the U.N. to tell them about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Tawfig said that he couldn't believe his eyes and ears. "When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfig stated. He had risked everything and then we totally disregarded what he had to say. So why would we have done this? I think that his is one of the easiest questions to answer. We had an agenda. The CIA wanted to get evidence that showed that there were weapons of mass destruction and when they got evidence that showed the exact opposite, they just disregarded it. Maybe I am being unfair to the CIA, perhaps the evidence was disregarded at a higher level. Maybe it even made it to the White House. I have no way of knowing and very few people would. Tawfig stated that the CIA had recruited many weapons scientists and was receiving reports from them for many years and they were all coming back the same. So here we had all these engineers and scientists in Iraq telling the U.S. Government that there was nothing to worry about, but these guys didn't know that the only thing we were looking for was proof stating that there were weapons of mass destruction. This certainly doesn't say much for Colin Powell either. You have to wonder how a man of his stature could let himself be used in such a way. Some might say that he was duped and didn't know that the reports he was presenting, along with the evidence, was false. The problem with this, is that it is hard to believe that someone this high up in the government didn't at least suspect that something was wrong. He should have resigned rather than do what he did at the U.N. If he would have done this, his reputation would have remained a lot higher than it is now.

Tawfig stated that there were twenty questions that his sister carried to him from America. He said that they talked about programs that no longer existed, or were never implemented and he kept answering NO to each question and even swore on his mother's grave that the answers were true. Apparently it made no difference what he said. He went on to say that if you exposed anything you were killed and even if you hid anything the penalty was the same. So what did the CIA have to say about this? They gave a very short answer stating that they were not ignoring the Iraqi engineers and scientists, they said that they had gotten contradictory evidence from other sources and went with that. Give me a break. What better source could you have than the people that ran the weapons programs in Iraq? The truly sad part of all this is that hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed by not using this evidence. We all know what happened to Iraq. Even if we equate this with finance, most of our national debt could have been paid off with the money that we spent in Iraq, but of course lives are more important than money. I haven't even mentioned the thousands upon thousands of Americans that have become maimed and disfigured. All this could have been avoided if we would have used the evidence that was supplied to us by the Iraqi scientists and engineers. It is a shame that a political agenda took precedence over lives.

Tawfig's sister took quite a chance going to Iraq and she had stated that she was very nervous. You certainly can't blame her for that, everyone knew what Saddam would do to her if he found out that she was a spy. Her brother had begged her to make the CIA believe that what they were being told by the scientists and engineers was true. When she got back to the states, she realized that the answers she gave them got a luke warm reception, so she went to Washington to plead her case. We now know that this made absolutely no difference. Tawfig knew that Iraq no longer had the ability to run a nuclear program, or any program of mass destruction after the first invasion, but no matter how hard he tried to convey this to the CIA, they just wouldn't listen. Even if the attack on Iraq was not premeditated and was only an act of stupidity, shouldn't stupidity on this level be considered a crime?