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| Iraq |
| Iraqi defectors’ weapons claims were ’false’ |
| 2003-09-30 |
| Follow-up on previous stories. EFL. US military intelligence has concluded that almost all the claims made by Iraqi defectors about Saddam Hussein’s alleged secret weapons were either useless or false, it was reported yesterday. The assessment by the Pentagon defence intelligence agency (DIA), leaked to US journalists, amounts to an indictment of the Iraqi National Congress, which brought the defectors to Washington’s attention, adding to the momentum towards invasion. A DIA official would not confirm or deny the report’s existence yesterday, saying any such document would be classified, but adding: "Any intelligence we get from an individual we never use as a sole source but we add it to our database. We don’t make decisions or take action based on sole sources." More and more evidence that the INC is pretty useless. The leak reflects a growing backlash by the US intelligence agencies — principally the CIA, DIA and the state department’s intelligence arm — whose findings and recommendations on Iraq were overruled before the war in favour of far more sensational assessments made by ideologically driven groups in the Pentagon and the vice-president’s office. "All this is coming out now, because they didn’t have the political spine to do it before," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-intelligence operations. "Now the tide has turned internally in terms of the use of intelligence before the war." Then again, we have more info now that we can read Saddam’s paperwork and can cross-check everything we knew before. The DIA report strikes at the heart of administration’s justification for going to war: that the Iraqi regime represented an imminent danger to the US because of its development of weapons of mass destruction. GWB never said "imminent danger", he said "gathering storm": it was the whole basis for pre-emption, that one couldn’t wait for imminent danger. But that would require the AP reporter to read GWB’s speeches. A report by a CIA-led search team, the Iraqi Survey Group, due to be delivered to Congress this week, is expected to confirm that no stockpiles of such weapons have been found after a six-month hunt. Much of the US and British case against Saddam was built on the testimony of defectors, and in Washington at least, most of those defectors were shepherded out of Iraq by the INC. DIA officials interviewed about half a dozen defectors in European capitals and in the Kurdish-run northern city of Irbil in late 2002 and 2003. They brought with them claims that Saddam was continuing to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons underground and undetected by UN inspectors. But according to the DIA report, only a third of the information they provided was of any interest, and most of the leads arising from the rest proved groundless. The INC defectors were largely spurned by the CIA and state department, who believed they were concocting stories in the hope of being resettled in the US. Sounds like they wanted to make sure we liberated their country, so they "embellished" their stories. But they won an enthusiastic audience in the Pentagon’s office of special plans (OSP), set up after September 11, which became a parallel civilian channel for intelligence on Iraq, operating independently of the uniformed officers running the DIA. The OSP has been disbanded since the war, but its staff remains at work under different titles in the Pentagon. Could someone remind the AP reporter that removing Saddam did not cause the earth to stop spinning? |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 Robert: The difference between Al Guardian and Pravda is that Guardian is more expensive due to the translation costs. (From an old french joke about the main communist newspaper) |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-9-30 10:12:34 AM |
| #2 JFM -- how can you tell the difference between the Guardian and Pravda? Pravda at least gets the spelling right. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2003-9-30 8:07:46 AM |
| #1 Beware: former Pravda journalist now working at al Guardian. |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-9-30 7:56:58 AM |