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The garbage intelligence that helped to unleash a wa
Mon Jun 23 18:12:58 2003
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The garbage intelligence that helped to unleash a war
June 21 2003

Doubts...A satellite photo of a claimed isotope separation plant.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/20/1055828490548.html

Western intelligence agencies knew that some of the evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was false, reports Marian Wilkinson.

A forged document was used to support claims by George Bush, John Howard and Tony Blair about Iraq's nuclear weapons program - even though the CIA and the State Department in the United States had dismissed it months earlier as "garbage", as one analyst said.

A defector managed by Iraq's leading opposition group supported the most extravagant claims by the same Western leaders about biological weapons even though United Nations inspectors could not corroborate his allegations.

Before the war, Mr Howard repeated the claims of Mr Blair and Mr Bush that "Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons". He cited "the published detailed dossiers of British and American intelligence" as "compelling evidence".

But as three legislative bodies in the US, Britain and Australia review that intelligence, some of it is becoming shaky. In one instance it was manufactured. In others, the intelligence was hedged with qualifications that were somehow dumped once it appeared in political speeches or declassified reports.

Much of this was known before the war. A more sober analysis of Iraq's prohibited weapons programs was continually offered by the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei.

As Dr Blix said in a US interview this week: "Is the United Nations on a different planet? Are reports from here totally unread south of the Hudson [River]?"

There are hard questions facing the Australian Senate inquiry. Did the intelligence reporting from Australia's missions at the UN in New York, the Washington embassy, the London high commission and the Australian representative at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna fail to provide a critical analysis of the US claims? Or did Howard and his ministers hype the intelligence reports to justify the war?

"There's more and more evidence that public opinion in our three countries was manipulated by the Bush Administration with the fragments of intelligence that they had," said Jonathan Dean, a security analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

Two case studies, both under scrutiny in the US, raise serious questions about whether the intelligence was just hyped or knowingly distorted. The first is the claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program that had been dismantled after the first Gulf War in 1991.

For the past three months, Congressman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, has been trying to unravel how forged documents were used by Mr Bush to support the charge that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger for use in a nuclear program. Mr Howard repeated this claim just weeks before the war after a meeting with the President.

Mr Waxman's inquiries and a number of US reports indicate that the Niger documents were identified as forged long before Mr Bush said in his State of the Union address on January 28: "The British Government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Mr Bush's speech, says the White House, was "closely vetted by the intelligence agencies", including the CIA. Yet nearly a year earlier the CIA and the State Department knew that the documents were forgeries.

Several accounts cited by Mr Waxman say the CIA was asked to investigate the documents by the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, in February 2002.

A senior diplomat, an experienced African hand, was sent to Niger to investigate. Within weeks he told the CIA and State Department the documents were obvious forgeries.

The CIA told the White House of the results. About the same time, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the claims were "garbage".

Greg Thielmann, a former senior official with the bureau, told The New Republic that until 2002 "we never assessed that there was good evidence that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear weapons program".

Yet by September 2002, the phoney Niger documents resurfaced in the famous British intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Neither the CIA nor the State Department publicly challenged the British dossier. Indeed, two months later they approved a State Department document that repeated the Niger claim.

By late January, after Mr Bush repeated the charge, the IAEA was asking for evidence. The Iraqi Government had denied the claim to the agency's weapons inspectors.

In February, the US finally handed over the Niger documents. It took the IAEA a day to establish they were false. Within weeks it had also dismissed the other US claims, including charges that Iraq was importing special aluminium tubes to process uranium, and that satellite photos showed Iraq rebuilding its nuclear facilities.

On March 7, the IAEA chief, Dr El Baradei, reported his findings to the UN Security Council, saying: "We have to date found no evidence or plausible indications of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq."

By this stage, UN weapons inspectors were also raising doubts about other US intelligence, including defector claims that Iraq had reconstituted its biological warfare program.

From January 2002, US intelligence, and the White House, had repeatedly referred to claims by an Iraqi defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who had escaped aided by Dr Ahmed Chalabi's opposition party, the INC. His claims were widely reported in the US and British media, including one version that Iraq was working on the deadly "Blue Nile" virus. The claims were the first hard evidence that Saddam was rebuilding a biological program and were soon supported by other defectors. UN sources say that when inspectors went back into Iraq they searched for some of the sites nominated by al-Haideri but nothing was found.

The arguments about Iraq's biological program had vexed weapons inspectors since August 1995 when Iraq's most famous defector, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, General Kamal Hussein, fled to Jordan. He had been closely involved with Iraq's WMD programs.

He told the then chief UN weapons inspector, Rolf Ekeus, and his team, that Iraq had destroyed all WMD programs. Soon after, he returned to Iraq, and was shot.

The UN inspectors had uncovered Iraq's hidden biological program before the general's defection. But what he disclosed for the first time was that Iraq had put biological material into actual weapons. He also told them where to find records of the program.

After the general's death, inspectors could never be sure the weapons programs had been destroyed as he claimed or whether Saddam had countered his orders.

The only way to resolve the issue was for inspectors to force Iraq to account for all the stockpiles of chemical and biological agents that it claimed to have destroyed.

US intelligence, and some UN inspectors, never believed Iraq had destroyed the programs despite General Kamal's account. Mr Bush and Mr Powell would repeatedly refer to Iraq's anthrax and mustard gas as if they were still in weapons ready to be used. Dr Blix told the Herald last year: "There is a good deal of capability in the chemical and biological sphere, but for a [weapons] program you need to have a will and a plan. We don't have evidence of that, we don't exclude it".

Significantly, the US Defence Intelligence Agency was also more qualified about Iraq's weapons program than Mr Bush's public statements. In a then secret report on Iraq's chemical programs last September, it said: "Although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses [chemical warfare] in chemical munitions, possibly including artillery rockets, artillery shells, aerial bombs and ballistic missile warheads."

But by using defectors, the White House, the DIA and the CIA could bolster their belief that Iraq had revived its weapons programs with evidence.

Meanwhile, of the 1200-strong search team in Iraq, only a few hundred are in the field. Most are putting together documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials.

They have little to hinder them. Most of the key Iraqis involved are in custody, including, the DIA says, Saddam's adviser on the prohibited weapons, Amir al-Saadi. At the time of his arrest in April, al-Saadi was still insisting Iraq had no concealed WMD programs.

This week, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said deals were being offered to Iraqi POWs who give information on the elusive weapons.

He is optimistic.
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SADDAM TAPE

Press play for the voice of Saddam Click: An audiotape has been handed to the Herald in Baghdad, with this tantalising claim: it is the voice of Saddam Hussein only two days ago, Ed O'Loughlin reports. more The tape: Voice of Saddam Hussein? Mystery tape: Full transcript of the Saddam recording Saddam: dead or alive?

An audiotape has been handed to the Herald in Baghdad, with this tantalising claim: it is the voice of Saddam Hussein only two days ago, Ed O'Loughlin reports. more

-The tape: Voice of Saddam Hussein?
http://media.f2.com.au/?rid=12132&site=smh 

Mystery tape: Full transcript of the Saddam recording
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/07/1051987718936.html

Saddam: dead or alive?
http://www.smh.com.au/media/2003/05/07/1051987737012.html 

• Now Bush blames failure to find WMD on looters — Rupert Cornwell, Mon Jun 23 18:25