NYT: Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09defe.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

Shortly after President Bush declared war on terrorism in the fall of 2001, the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, sent out a simple, urgent message to its network of intelligence agents: find evidence of outlawed weapons that would make Saddam Hussein a prime target for the United States.

Inevitably, that request reached Muhammad al-Zubaidi, himself an Iraqi exile who had been working to undermine Mr. Hussein for 24 years from posts in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq. Under the playful name of Al Deeb - Arabic for The Wolf - Mr. Zubaidi, now 52, served as a field leader for about 75 to 100 people who collected information about the machinations of Iraq's police state.

Over the next three months, Mr. Zubaidi and his associates collected statements from defectors who said they had knowledge of Mr. Hussein's military facilities and who had fled Iraq into neighboring countries.

In short order, that same group of defectors took their stories to American intelligence agents and journalists. The defectors spoke of a nation pocketed with mobile weapons laboratories, a new secret weapons site beneath a Baghdad hospital, a meeting between a member of Mr. Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden - accounts that ultimately became potent elements in Mr. Bush's case for war.

Those accusations remain unproven. In fact, Mr. Zubaidi said in interviews last week in Lebanon, the ominous claims by the defectors differed significantly from the versions that they had first related to him and his associates. Mr. Zubaidi provided his handwritten diaries from 2001 and 2002, and his reports on the statements originally made by the defectors.

[troublemaker]

1. Hahahaha

"In short order, that same group of defectors took their stories to American intelligence agents and journalists"

Gee, I wonder who? Are they still pretending Ms Miller is a journalist? I love bogus media self-examination.

[hedda_foil]

2. Lies and the lying liars who coach them.

Mr. Musawi said the risk to the I.N.C. of coaching defectors was considerable, because it had enemies in Washington. If a story was quickly disproved, he said, "We would look pretty stupid."

Despite this, Mr. Kay said that during the hunt for weapons last year, a number of the defectors admitted they were lying after being put through a polygraph test. "Some of them claimed to have been coached by the I.N.C., and some of them claimed to have been coached on how to pass polygraphs," Mr. Kay said.

Mr. Zubaidi said, "I don't want to criticize U.S. agencies; but it's strange that the U.S. with all its powerful agencies, the C.I.A., could not manage to know the truth from the lies in these people."

[daleo]

3. Bush knew the truth

He just wanted these liars to provide a cover story for what he wanted to do all along, which was get Saddam and get the oil.

[markses]

4. Where "embellished" means an outright self-interested lie

Why does crack (cocaine) reporter Judith Miller still work for the new York Times?

[UpInArms]

5. Seymour Hersch exposed this in May 2003

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

<snip>

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.”

Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear- weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

...more...

[grytpype]

6. Good God.

How can Bush survive this? Can someone please tell me? I mean am I losing my mind or something?

[Newsjock]

7. By screaming TERRA!

It shuts everything else out of the news. Even if the media start getting suspicious, they still end up talking about the political overtones of screaming TERRA! They're still not talking about all the stuff it's distracting you from.