http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/politics/13reda.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=July 13, 2004
INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Doubts on Informant Deleted in Senate Text
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, July 12 - Among the passages deleted from the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Iraq is a detailed assessment that casts doubt on the credibility of an Iraqi defector whose claims about Iraq's mobile biological weapons laboratories have been discredited, according to government officials. His name was kept secret because he is still working for British intelligence, they said.
About one-fifth of the 511-page report still has not been made public, despite objections from both Republican and Democratic senators. As in the case of the Iraqi defector, the deletions were the result of objections raised by American intelligence agencies in the interest of protecting sources and methods, sometimes in deference to a foreign intelligence service, according to American government officials who have read the classified version of the Senate committee's report.
In the classified version of the report, the officials said, nearly three pages are devoted to questioning the credibility of the defector, who was one of four human sources cited last year by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations as having provided crucial information about Iraq's mobile laboratories. But in the public version of the report, released Friday, all but one paragraph in those pages is blacked out.
The defector, known to the Central Intelligence Agency as Red River, failed a polygraph examination, the American officials said. But they said crucial information about the source had been deleted from the report in deference to British intelligence, which originally relayed the information provided by the defector to the United States and has maintained a continuing relationship with him.
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