Word: sso
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...Saddam's inner circle. He still looks the part: he has the characteristic paunch, the moustache, the Rolex, the confident walk of a senior officer. He spent a year in the foreign directorate of the Defense Ministry, then transferred into Jihaz al-Amin al-Khas, or Special Security Organization (SSO), the elite intelligence outfit responsible for Saddam's personal security, the construction and hiding of weapons of mass destruction and other sensitive tasks. In the 1990s, Abu Harith ran a front company in Jordan purchasing computers, chemical-analysis equipment and special paper for forging passports; then he moved...
According to an hourlong report on Cable News Network's Impact, produced by TIME and CNN, the main group assigned to hide Iraq's weapons program is the Special Security Organization, a shadowy agency that also provides protection for Saddam. The SSO's director is Saddam's younger son, Qusay Saddam Hussein. The agency's activities, Impact reports, have always been well known to Tariq Aziz, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, who has vehemently denied there is any effort at concealment. Asked by TIME whether he discussed the SSO with Aziz and Saddam, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said...
...SSO was handed the job of hiding the weapons programs at the end of the Gulf War, during the 15-day period when Iraq was ordered by the U.N. to list all its instruments of mass destruction. Over the next four years, the SSO did such an effective job of deception that by July 1995, UNSCOM was ready to declare its task done and close up shop. Then an extraordinary event happened: Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Lieut. General Hussein Kamel al-Majid, who had been in charge of Iraq's secret-weapons development, defected to Jordan, where...
Instead of disbanding, the U.N. redoubled its effort to find hidden documents and weapons, creating a "counterconcealment team," headed by former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter. At one point, when Ritter and his team tried to enter an SSO facility in downtown Baghdad, a guard pointed a loaded gun at his head and prepared to fire. In the end Ritter, who spoke in depth for the first time about his work to CNN, did his job too well: he was accused of being a CIA spy and denied access to sensitive sites...
...wonderful honor to have such adistinguished statesman hare at Harvard," Fliersaid. "His activities as a dissident, as a writerand now as a political figure are admirable. He'sso noble in the way he goes about his duties...