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Iraqi Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War
Colin Powell presented the U.N. with details on mobile germ factories, which came from a now-discredited source known as 'Curveball.'

Los Angeles Times -- March 28, 2004

By Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with details that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections.

Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.

Based largely on his account, President Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, dubbed "Winnebagos of Death" or "Hell on Wheels" in news accounts, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.

"This is the one that's damning," he said. "This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward."

Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us." But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

Last May, the CIA announced that it had found two of the suspect trucks in northern Iraq, but the agency later backtracked. However, in the absence of evidence to support many of its prewar claims, the Bush administration has continued to cling to the possibility that biowarfare trucks might still exist.

Vice President Dick Cheney as recently as January referred to the trucks as "conclusive" proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. CIA Director George J. Tenet later told a Senate committee that he called Cheney to warn him that the evidence was increasingly suspect.

Tenet gave the first hint of the underlying problem in a speech at Georgetown University on Feb. 5.

"I must tell you we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" about mobile biological weapons production, he said. "Because we lack direct access to the most important sources on this question, we have as yet been unable to resolve the differences."

U.S. and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since major combat ended in Iraq that lies or distortions by Iraqi opposition groups in exile contributed to numerous misjudgments about Iraq's suspected weapons programs. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress is blamed most often, but the rival Iraqi National Accord and various Kurdish groups also were responsible for sending dubious defectors to Western intelligence, officials say.

Still, the Curveball case may be especially damaging because no other credible defector has provided firsthand confirmation that Iraq modified vehicles to produce germ agents, and no proof has been found before or after the end of major combat. Iraqi officials interrogated since the war have all denied that such a program existed.

The story of Curveball is now under close review by an internal panel at the CIA, as well as House and Senate oversight committees. All are seeking to determine why so much of the prewar intelligence now appears seriously flawed.

Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading the internal review, defended the agency's handling of the case. He said there were strong reasons to believe that the vehicles existed because the defector's information was consistent with years of intelligence on Iraq's covert efforts to obtain chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

"It was detailed and specific and made a lot of sense," Kerr said. He said the CIA believed that Iraq was developing and concealing banned weapons programs in civilian chemical and pharmaceutical facilities. "You get reporting on mobile production facilities … and you say it makes some sense."

Nor did Kerr fault the agency for relying so heavily on an anonymous source whom it could not interview. In this case, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, repeatedly rejected CIA requests to meet Curveball, saying it needed to protect its source. But U.S. and German officials said the BND furnished its file on the defector to U.S. authorities and at times had him answer specific questions from U.S. intelligence.

"Intelligence is often based on information where you can't go back and talk to the source or verify it," Kerr said. "So you turn to the basic questions. 'Does it make sense? Is it logical? Does it appear he could have been at the right place at the right time to know these things?' " The defector met those tests, he said.

One focus of the ongoing investigations is whether the CIA should have known Curveball was not credible. A former U.S. official who has reviewed the classified file said the BND warned the CIA last spring that it had "various problems with the source." Die Zeit, a German newsweekly, first reported the warning last August.

The official said the BND sent the warning after Powell first described the biowarfare trucks in detail to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. It's unclear whether the German warning arrived before the war began on March 20 last year.

"You can imagine the consternation it kicked off," the official said. "It suggested that what [the Germans had] been passing to us was false. They were backing away."

Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, declined to comment Friday on that charge or questions about the case. An official at BND headquarters in Berlin, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also declined to answer questions. "We believed that Iraq had these mobile biological facilities," the official said.

Although previous CIA reports had referred to the biowarfare trucks, Powell's U.N. presentation put them in the spotlight.

Citing "eyewitness accounts," he called them "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq."

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said. He showed what he called "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured, and warned that they could spew enough anthrax or botulinus toxin "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

But Kay, who sought to confirm Curveball's claims in Iraq after the end of major combat, said Powell's account was "disingenuous."

Kay added: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name,' as he's describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Powell assured U.N. diplomats that two other Iraqi sources, who he said were "in a position to know," had corroborated the "eyewitness account." The CIA later said those reports arrived in December 2000 and mid-2002.

Kay said the debriefing files on the pair showed that they never had direct contact with the biowarfare trucks. "None of them claimed to have seen them," he said. "They said they were aware of the mobile program. They had heard there was a mobile program."

CIA files showed that another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, specifically denied that they had worked on such facilities, Kay said. Powell did not cite that defector.

The CIA acknowledged last month that a fourth defector whom Powell cited at the U.N., a former major in Iraq's intelligence service, had lied when he said that Baghdad had built mobile research laboratories to test biological agents. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency twice debriefed that defector in early 2002 and reported his claims. But it then concluded that he did not have firsthand information and probably was coached by Chalabi's exile group.

In May 2002, the agency posted a "fabrication notice" on a classified computer network to warn other U.S. intelligence agencies that the defector had lied. But CIA officials said the notice was overlooked, and his information was cited both in Powell's speech and the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to Congress.

The Curveball case began in 1992, when weapons inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq, frustrated at their failure to find Iraq's germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report in which they speculated that Baghdad could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified vans or trucks.

Based on that hypothesis, the U.N. weapons hunters and U.S. intelligence analysts studying U-2 spy plane and high-altitude satellite images of Iraq were instructed to watch for a potential "signature" of a germ factory on wheels — pairs of 35-foot trucks, working in tandem, parked parallel, with communications gear, high security and a water source.

Eavesdropping on Iraqi military communications had already proved that they were moving sensitive documents to avoid detection. U.N. inspectors also knew that Iraq used tanker trucks to fill chemical warheads on the battlefield in the 1980s, raising suspicions that it might also have produced chemical or biological agents in trucks.

In 1994, Israel's military intelligence passed word that Iraq was hiding poison factories in commercial trucks — red-and-white "Tip Top Ice Cream" trucks and green moving vans from "Sajida Transport," named for the dictator's wife.

The U.N. inspectors concluded that neither company existed, and some inspectors were skeptical about the whole idea.

Raymond A. Zilinskas, who helped inspect 61 biological facilities in Iraq in 1994, said he had argued that biowarfare trucks were difficult to build, dangerous to operate and hard to hide. "They just didn't make sense from a technical or a security viewpoint," he said.

But the theory gained new credence when Gen. Amir Saadi, then a senior Iraqi weapons official, told U.N. inspectors in August 1995 that he had proposed building germ-producing trucks and other mobile facilities in 1988, chiefly to avoid air attack, but that regime officials rejected his concept as impractical.

Saadi, who became science advisor to Hussein and chief liaison to U.N. inspectors before the war, turned himself in to U.S. forces in Baghdad on April 12, 2003, after telling German TV that Iraq had no illicit weapons. He remains in U.S. custody.

Saadi's 1995 statement rang alarms at the CIA and elsewhere, however. Intelligence reports soon referred to a possible series of three trucks that would operate as a single biological agent factory. One truck would carry fermenters, another would carry mixing and preparation tanks, and the third, equipment to process and store the product.

U.N. inspectors stepped up their search in response. So did Western spy services.

In 1996, Holland's National Intelligence and Security Agency, known as the BVD, sent word that an informant code-named "Fulcrum," a former Iraqi intelligence officer, had supplied a list of government-issued, blue-and-white, sequentially numbered license plates that supposedly were used on the germ trucks. But the inspectors could never find licenses with those numbers.

Then, in March 1997, a U-2 spy plane that the U.S. government operated for the U.N. photographed three or four large box-type trucks parked outside a garage used by Iraq's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat. U.N. teams swooped in — and found that the trucks were filled with construction material.

The U.N. team members then asked headquarters in New York to let them run random roadblocks in Iraq. They also asked for "hot pursuit" authority, with fast cars and helicopters capable of spraying foam on the roads, in case they had to chase a fleeing germ truck. Officials in New York quickly rejected both proposals.

"We were told that was insane," said Scott Ritter, a former chief U.N. inspector who headed a special investigations unit and who served as the U.N. team's liaison to U.S. intelligence. "And they were right."

But the U.N. inspections operation in New York, then headed by Australian diplomat Richard Butler, did approve another plan.

The inspectors long had relied on intelligence from sympathetic governments and dissident groups. Chalabi had lobbied Washington for years to overthrow Hussein and claimed that he had spies inside the Baghdad regime.

In December 1997, Ritter said, he and his deputy, a former British army major attached to the U.N. team, flew to London to ask Chalabi for help. They met for three hours over dinner at Chalabi's Mayfair residence with the influential Iraqi exile and Ahmed Allawi, who headed intelligence operations for the Iraqi National Congress.

"Chalabi outlined what he could do for us," Ritter recalled. "His intelligence guy outlined their sources and said he had people inside the government. They told us they had the run of Iraq. Just tell them what we needed. So we outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bioweapons labs. Basically, we gave them a shopping list."

"They began feeding us information," Ritter said. "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff flowing in. At first blush, it looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

Haider Musawi, an INC media liaison in Baghdad, said in a telephone interview Saturday that he could not confirm the meetings had occurred. Asked about INC ties to Curveball, he replied, "I really can't think of such a defector."

U.S. officials say Curveball apparently showed up in Germany in 1998, but it is unclear how he got there. The Times was unable to ascertain Curveball's real name or his current location.

What is clear is that by 2000, Curveball had provided a vast array of convincing detail about the illicit program he claimed to manage.

He outlined how each office was set up and the names on each door. He described how walls were moved to help hide trucks. He identified several dozen fellow team members — even a lowly aide who rented their cars. He provided diagrams showing how stainless steel tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts were configured on nickel-plated flooring in each truck.

U.N. weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002 considered the trucks a "high priority," said a former inspector who helped supervise more than 70 raids for evidence of germ weapons in the four months before the war.

They checked every site Curveball had identified, as well as others picked by U.S. intelligence. They tested waste lines in food-testing vans, took samples from refrigerator trucks, and searched for truck parts, blueprints, purchase orders or other evidence in factories, laboratories and elsewhere.

"We didn't find anything," the former inspector said.

After Powell's U.N. speech, inspectors demanded that Baghdad identify every mobile facility it owned.

In letters delivered on March 3 and March 15, just days before the war started, Iraqi officials handed over detailed descriptions, backed by 39 photographs and four videotapes, of mobile disease analysis labs, mobile military morgues, X-ray trucks, military bakery vans, mobile ice factories, refrigerated drug and food transport trucks and other special vehicles. Some had stainless steel equipment that appeared similar to the diagrams Powell had shown the U.N.

After major combat ended, the U.S. forces recovered two suspect trailer trucks in northern Iraq. A CIA report last May 28 concluded that two trucks "probably" were designed to produce lethal toxins in liquid slurry, and Bush said U.S. forces thus had "found" Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

But Pentagon analysts warned that the trucks probably produced hydrogen for artillery weather balloons, and the CIA backtracked. It now says there is "no consensus" on the trucks' use.

During the summer, Kay's investigators visited Curveball's parents and brother in Baghdad, as well as his former work sites. They determined that he was last in his class at the University of Baghdad, not first as he had claimed. They learned he had been fired from his job and jailed for embezzlement before he fled Iraq.

"He was wrong about so much," Kay recalled. "Physical descriptions he gave for buildings and sites simply didn't match reality. Things started to fall apart."

Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, retains strong support in the White House. He was a guest of First Lady Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address last January, and his organization still receives several hundred thousand dollars a month from the Pentagon to help collect intelligence in Iraq.

Chalabi says he has been unfairly blamed for the failure to find germ trucks or any other unconventional weapons in Iraq since major combat ended. He blames the CIA instead.

"Intelligence people are supposed to do a better job for their country, and their government did not do such a good job," he told CBS' "60 Minutes" in a recent interview. "This is a ridiculous situation."

INC defectors were always accused of having an ax to grind, he said. "So why did the CIA believe them so much?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

- mark 4-04-2004 4:50 pm [link]

[Knight-Ridder is willing to explain how it was duped by Chalibi, Inc., a subsidiary of Cheney-Rumsfeld Propoganda Ventures. The San Jose Mercury News has more journalistic integrity than the New York Times? Who knew?]

Iraqi exiles fed exaggerated tips to news media
GLOBAL MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN WAS USED TO BUILD CASE FOR WAR

San Jose Mercury News -- March 16, 2004

By Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells
Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.
List of articles cited by the Information Collection Program (ICP)
San Jose Mercury News -- March 16, 2004
3 Stories Published in MN
San Jose Mercury News -- March 16, 2004
The Mercury News published three of the 108 stories cited by the Iraqi National Congress in a letter to Congress. The INC said the stories were based on information it provided to media outlets -- and much of that information has been found to be fabricated or exaggerated.

"We would not have published these stories had we known they were based on faulty information provided by the Iraqi National Congress," said Mercury News Executive Editor Susan Goldberg. "We want our readers to know about this situation."

Here are the three stories:

Headline: "Defectors: Iraqi terror camp targeted; U.S. trainees reportedly learned hijacking; site had biological agents"
Date Nov. 8, 2001, Page 5A, by the New York Times
Synopsis:Two Iraqi degectors tell of a training camp for Islamist terrorists south of Baghdad and also claim that Iraqi scientists there produced biological weapons.

Headline: "Mystery shrouds Atta meeting with Iraqi spy"
Date Dec. 16, 2001, Page 24A, by the New York Times
Synopsis: Several former Iraqi intelligence officers claim a top Iraqi spy, masquerading as a diplomat, met in Prague with Mohamed Atta, the apparent ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Headline: "Evidence of Iraqi weapons: Defector says chemical , nuclear labs functioning in secret"
Date Dec. 20, 2001, Page 22A, by the New York Times
Synopsis: An Iraqi defector said he worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in wells, villas, and a hospital in Baghdad.

- mark 3-17-2004 10:21 am [link] [4 refs]

[Seen at Eschaton.]

Donald Rumsfeld and Thomas Friedman -- pdf
CBS News' Face the Nation -- March 14, 2004

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s-- suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know. David Kay said we're about 85 percent there. I don't know if that's the right percentage. But the Iraqi Survey Group--we've got 1,200 people out there looking. It's a country the size of California. He could have hidden his--enough chemical or biol--enough biological weapons in the hole that--that we found Saddam Hussein in to kill tens of thousands of people. So--so it's not as though we have certainty today.

- mark 3-15-2004 10:51 am [link]

U.S. pays Iraqi group for questionable intelligence
New York Times via Miami Herald -- March 11, 2004

By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is paying $340,000 a month to the Iraqi political organization led by Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the interim Iraqi government who has close ties to the Bush administration, for "intelligence collection" about Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.

- mark 3-11-2004 1:35 pm [link]

[Did misconstrue, didn't misconstrue ... eh? Not his job to worry about that.]

Tenet defends Bush administration, saying it didn't misconstrue facts on Iraq
Associated Press via San Jose Mercury News -- March 10, 2004

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet told skeptical Democrats he believes policy-makers are entitled to flexibility in how they interpret and describe intelligence and that it is not his role to second-guess them in public.

- mark 3-11-2004 1:31 pm [link]

CIA chief contradicts Cheney, rejecting Iraq link to Al-Qaida
San Jose Mercury News -- March 10, 2004

By Jonathan S. Landay
WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet on Tuesday rejected recent assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq cooperated with the Al-Qaida terrorist network and that the administration had proof of an illicit Iraqi biological warfare program.

- mark 3-11-2004 1:27 pm [link]

IRAQ: CIA Chief Clueless on Neo-Con Intelligence Channel
Inter Press Service News Agency -- March 10, 2004

Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (IPS) - Was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet really the last person in Washington to find out that both the president and vice president were being fed phoney or ''sexed up'' intelligence about pre-war Iraq by a Pentagon office staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?

- mark 3-11-2004 1:24 pm [link]

McCain Says WMD Commission Needs Subpoena Power
Reuters -- March 7, 2004

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on Sunday the commission created by President Bush to investigate intelligence failures in the buildup to the Iraq war needs subpoena power.
McCain, a member of the bipartisan panel, said such powers would give commission "certain credibility," and voiced hope an agreement would be reached to obtain it.

Asked on ABC's "This Week" if he would continue to serve on the commission if it did not get subpoena power, McCain, a maverick, said, "I'd hate to throw down a gauntlet like that."

"I am hopeful and somewhat optimistic that this could be worked out," McCain said.

Bush, under pressure from Democrats and Republicans, created the commission on Feb. 6 to determine why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in postwar Iraq. The Bush administration cited the threat of such weapons programs as a primary reason for the Iraqi war.

"It's clear that there were intelligence failures," McCain said. "But that does not in any way, in my view, remove the justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush gave the commission until March 31, 2005, to report back, meaning results will not be known until after November when voters decide whether to give him a second term.

McCain said, "I think it needs subpoena power, and I think it needs to look at every aspect of the intelligence situation, including how intelligence was used."

"It's not because I don't trust the administration. There are other agencies outside government and other governments outside the United States that probably we need to have information from," McCain said.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

- mark 3-07-2004 10:03 pm [link]

Senators question intelligence chiefs on Iraq WMD
Reuters via The Daily Times -- March 6, 2004

WASHINGTON: The Senate Intelligence Committee questioned the heads of the major US intelligence agencies behind closed doors on Thursday about prewar estimates on Iraqi weapons programs, which critics say showed a stronger threat than what was discovered after the US-led invasion.

The directors of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, flanked by staff, met with the Senate panel that is drafting a report expected to criticize the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

- mark 3-06-2004 12:37 pm [link]

Blair wants more pre-emptive military strikes
ABC News Online -- March 6, 2004

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, battling to shake off the damaging controversy of the Iraq war, has called for a shake-up of the United Nations and suggested international law may needed changing to allow pre-emptive military strikes.

- mark 3-06-2004 12:33 pm [link]

Blair lacked critical thinking, says Blix
The Guardian -- March 6, 2004

Richard Norton-Taylor and David Leigh
Hans Blix, the UN's former chief weapons inspector, last night delivered a robust critique of Tony Blair's defence of the invasion of Iraq, questioning the prime minister's judgment, especially his response to claims made by the intelligence agencies.

- mark 3-06-2004 12:29 pm [link]

Kennedy says Bush deceived U.S. into Iraq
Accusation of 'fear mongering' signals new wave of criticism by Democrats

New York Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- March 6, 2004

Douglas Jehl
Washington -- Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered a blistering indictment Friday of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, accusing Bush of deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

- mark 3-06-2004 12:16 pm [link]

U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms, Reportedly Ignored Contrary Reports
New York Times -- March 6, 2004

By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the war in Iraq, American intelligence agencies reviewed but ultimately dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The reports, which ran contrary to the conclusions of the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration, were not acknowledged publicly by top government officials before the invasion last March. In public statements, the agencies and the administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, which the administration cited as a main justification for going to war.

The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."

Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers, their foreign partners or other intelligence agents that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons.

The officials said they believed that intelligence agencies had dismissed the reports because they did not conform to a view, held widely within the administration and among intelligence analysts, that Iraq was hiding an illicit arsenal.

The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment directly on Ms. Harman's remarks. But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."

The government officials who described the contradictory reports have detailed knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq and were critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of the information. Because the information remains classified, the officials declined to discuss the identity of the sources in any detail, but said they believed the informants' views had been dismissed because they challenged the widely held consensus on Iraq's weapons.

"It appears that the human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting or useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq," said one senior government official with detailed knowledge of the prewar intelligence.

A second senior government official, who confirmed that account, said the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been "treated like a religion" within American intelligence agencies, with alternative views never given serious attention. The officials said they could not quantify the reports.

In a speech at Georgetown University last month, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, acknowledged for the first time that intelligence agencies might have been mistaken about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. None have been found yet.

Mr. Tenet said it was too soon to make final judgments. But he also defended intelligence analysts' performance, saying that they had not been swayed by political pressure and that "as intelligence professionals, we go where the information takes us."

He met Friday morning in a closed session with members of the House intelligence committee, as part of its inquiry into the prewar intelligence. In another closed session on the subject on Thursday, he spent more than four hours with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, issued a statement describing "a frank and useful exchange."

Senator Roberts said the committee hoped "sometime in the next several weeks" to issue an "initial report" based on its inquiry, which has focused on whether findings by intelligence agencies were supported by adequate evidence.

Among the reports that were discounted, the senior government officials said, was at least one account from an Iraqi scientist who said mysterious trailers described by other Iraqi defectors as part of a biological weapons program were for another, benign purpose, which the officials would not describe.

In prewar presentations and documents, including the unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, the intelligence agencies and the administration cited only human intelligence reports supporting the view that the trailers were for biological weapons.

An unclassified report issued in May by the C.I.A., which is still on the agency's Web site, concluded that the trailers had indeed been for biological weapons. But in the months since the war, most American intelligence analysts have come to believe that the trailers were not for that purpose, and were probably for making hydrogen for weather balloons, according to senior government officials. In testimony before Congress late last month, Mr. Tenet said the intelligence community was divided on the issue.

In the past month, some senior intelligence officials have acknowledged that some information from human sources on Iraq was mishandled, including reports based on interviews in early 2002 with an Iraqi defector who later that year was labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The information the defector provided was nevertheless included in the administration's statements, including the October 2002 intelligence assessment and Mr. Powell's speech. Intelligence officials have described the inclusion as a mistake.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

- mark 3-06-2004 12:13 pm [link]

Kennedy Says Bush Exaggerated Threat Posed by Saddam Hussein
VOA -- 6 Mar 2004

Nick Simeone
Washington -- One of the U.S. Senate's most senior Democrats is accusing President Bush of exaggerating the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to the world. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy used a speech Friday to question why CIA Director George Tenet waited until last month to say that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction did not pose an imminent danger.

- mark 3-06-2004 11:46 am [link]

[Pre-war Trailers of Mass Desctruction claims based on hearsay. Post-war TMD claims based on specious assessment.]

Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons
Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes

Washington Post -- March 5, 2004

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents.

In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said "firsthand descriptions" of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come from an Iraqi chemical engineer who had defected and is "currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him."

The claims about the mobile facilities remain unverified, however, and now U.S. officials are trying to get access to the Iraqi engineer to verify his story, the sources said, particularly because intelligence officials have discovered that he is related to a senior official in Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who actively encouraged the United States to invade Iraq.

Powell also cited another defector in his speech, an Iraqi major who was made available to U.S. officials by the INC, as supporting the engineer's story. The major, however, had already been "red-flagged" by the Defense Intelligence Agency as having provided questionable information about Iraq's mobile biological program. But DIA analysts did not pass along that cautionary note, and the major was cited in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and was mentioned in Powell's speech, officials said.

The administration's handling of intelligence alleging the existence of mobile bioweapons facilities has become part of several broad investigations now underway into the intelligence community's faulty prewar conclusions that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Senate and House intelligence committees are conducting probes, as are the CIA and a commission appointed by President Bush.

The investigation of claims about mobile weapons labs, however, does not just cover prewar intelligence, but also includes the performance of the intelligence community well after the invasion.

U.S. intelligence officials now describe as hasty and premature the May 28 public claim by the CIA and the DIA that two semitrailers discovered in Iraq in April were most likely part of the bioweapons fleet. [ed. Ya think?!]

The highly publicized claim, one official said, was triggered by a May 11 NBC News broadcast featuring David Kay, then a network analyst in Iraq, who would later become the chief U.S. weapons inspector there. Kay was shown next to one of the found vehicles with a chemical officer from the Army's 101st Airborne Division who, on camera, agreed that the semitrailer was equipped to make biological weapons.

Days later in Washington, the CIA and the DIA put out an unclassified white paper that said the production of biological agents "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles." The next day, Bush said the trailers showed that the United States had found former Iraqi president Hussein's prohibited weapons. "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong," Bush said. "We found them."

Since then, intelligence analysts and Kay, a nuclear-weapons expert with little experience with biological weapons, have said the trailers were probably not used in a bioweapons program. Kay has said he believes the trailers were likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

CIA Director George J. Tenet is expected to face questions today about the alleged mobile bioweapons fleet and other elements of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs when he appears in a closed session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He appeared before the Senate intelligence committee in closed session yesterday.

The Senate committee has drafted a highly critical report on the prewar intelligence of the CIA and other agencies. The problems uncovered in the mobile-bioweapons area illustrate what the panel has found in the collection and analysis of information about Iraq's chemical and nuclear programs.

Tenet has already disclosed that the agency has changed some procedures as a result of the problems discovered by its reviews. For example, there are new procedures on how to handle material flagged as coming from questionable sources, such as the Iraqi major. CIA analysts are now to be given more information from the CIA's operations division to help them assess the reliability of those who provide information.

CIA officials reviewing the bioweapons intelligence say that the engineer who provided the original tip never dealt directly with U.S. intelligence agencies, and that he passed along the information through a foreign intelligence service, which they refuse to name. U.S. intelligence analysts did not know his name before the war, relying entirely on foreign officials to vouch for his credibility, according to a former CIA employee as well as administration and congressional sources.

U.S. officials are trying to interview him, sources said, but the foreign intelligence service that originally forwarded his information has declined to produce him for questioning.

The May 28 white paper on the semitrailers is also under scrutiny. A retired senior intelligence official said recently that the unclassified paper was hastily put together before a full, classified analysis was written and circulated within the intelligence community.

The paper was produced so quickly, one senior administration official said, because of Kay's May appearance on NBC, in which he pointed to one semitrailer and said: "This is where the biological process took place . . . literally, there's nothing else you would do this way in a mobile facility."

Kay said he returned to Iraq as a U.S. weapons inspector a month after his television appearances and found that the DIA analysts who had inspected the trailers disagreed that they were part of mobile biological-agent production plants. By January, Kay had reassessed the matter, saying publicly that the "intelligence consensus" was that the semitrailers probably were for making hydrogen, not biological agents.

Administration officials continued to describe the threat posed by Hussein's mobile biological-weapons facilities.

On Jan. 22, Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio that Hussein had "spent time and effort acquiring biological weapons labs" and that the semitrailers "were, in fact, part of that program." He called the trailers "conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Hussein] did in fact have programs of mass destruction."

On Feb. 24, Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that there was "a big debate" about the trailers among CIA analysts "who still believe that they were for" bioweapons, and CIA and DIA analysts "who have posited another theory . . . and we haven't wrestled it to the ground yet."

Tenet said he had talked to Cheney and learned that his January statement was based on "an older judgment." © 2004 The Washington Post Company

- mark 3-07-2004 10:24 pm [link] [2 refs]

[The 11th of September justifies anything.]

Blair warns of WMD terror threat
CNN International -- March 5, 2004

LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned of the "real" threat of international terrorism and how it has to be confronted at all costs.

- mark 3-06-2004 12:24 pm [link]

["It ain't on me. Those shmucks shouldn't have believed our lies."]

Iraq's Chalabi Says 'Blame CIA, Not Me' About WMD
Reuters -- March 5, 2004

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi says he is tired of being blamed for misleading the United States about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and points the finger instead at the CIA in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" to be aired on Sunday.
Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress exile group and has close ties to the Bush administration, says the CIA should have done a better job analyzing information received from defectors he steered their way.

"This is a ridiculous situation," says Chalabi, who still maintains that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.

Chalabi said the CIA knew defectors can be biased and that even the press was saying "'defectors have an ax to grind, don't believe them."'

"Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people?" Chalabi said incredulously .

"Intelligence people who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government did not do such a good job."

Chalabi, who was born into a prominent Iraqi family but spent 45 years outside Iraq before returning in April, denies coaching defectors, something the CIA believe he's done for years, according to a former CIA analyst interviewed on the show.

The analyst, Ken Pollack, who now works for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and for CNN, said the Bush administration used the information to label Iraq an imminent threat.

Pollack said they were looking "to simply confirm a preconceived notion of an extremely threatening Iraq ... on the cusp of acquiring the most advanced ... dangerous weapons."

Pollack blames senior U.S. officials, not Chalabi.

"This is one of those ... 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,"' said Pollack. "Chalabi has a track record. We knew this guy wasn't telling us the truth."

A defiant Chalabi said he was eager to further defend himself.

"I want to be asked to testify in the United States Senate in the Intelligence Committee. I want to do this in an open session," he says.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

- mark 3-06-2004 11:59 am [link]

Seeking subpoenas
McCain and Bush clash on powers, scope of intel probe

The Hill -- March 4, 2004

By Alexander Bolton
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations.

The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer

- mark 3-05-2004 6:27 am [link]

Admit WMD mistake, survey chief tells Bush
The Guardian -- March 3, 2004

Julian Borger in Washington
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.

In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.

- mark 3-05-2004 6:34 am [link]

[Seen at Cursor.]

Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau -- March 2, 2004

By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

- mark 3-05-2004 6:19 am [link]






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