Unfolding weapons of mass destruction questions

Apparently Bush told intrepid and fearless reporter Tim Russert that he really really thought the damn things would turn up. Perhaps it was his inability to see out of the glass case Cheney and his people kept him in. Turns out that we now know the guy who told us about the mobile biological labs was thoroughly discredited already. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) put out a "fabricator warning" on the Iraqi army deserter, which apparently wasn't heeded. NY Times, Feb 6.:

Agency Alert about Iraqi not Heeded, Officials Say: An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency provided some of the information that went into United States intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March, senior government officials said Friday.

A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.

Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.

Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. interviewed the defector [and ...] concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence, the officials said.

Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.

In a related matter, the intelligence officials acknowledged that the United States still had not been able to interview two other people with access to senior Iraqi officials, and whose claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles were relayed to American officials in September 2002 by two foreign intelligence services.

So we have a direct connection between spoofery and suspected coaching by the INC. And we have evidence that parts of the government knew that this source shouldn't have been passing information into the National Intelligence Estimate, which is supposed to be America's key annual assessment of what's going on. This alone could be worth a grand jury. I am very curious now about the "foreign intelligence services" that have come up a lot in the news lately. It seems that countries like Germany who admitted that Saddam probably had WMD were also being misled.

Britain is faced with the imminent collapse of the famous "45 minutes" to weapons readiness claim which Blair put out before the war. It was compelling, and really undergirded whatever support the war could muster on the Isle. Yet it turns out that this too was provided by a shady exile, as well. The excellent UK source The Independent reports:

The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. An IoS investigation has established at the highest level that the "reliable source" obtained the information at second hand from a serving officer in the Iraqi army, with the rank either of full colonel or brigadier....

Said to have "military knowledge", the source maintained contacts with serving officers in Saddam Hussein's armed forces. But the fact that he was not in Iraq meant that the information he provided, especially on such an important point as whether Saddam had active plans to use chemical and biological weapons, did not meet normal standards for assessing intelligence, especially as it was unsupported by documentary evidence. There was no definite information on whether chemical or biological warheads were with front-line units, which would have made it feasible that they could be used within 45 minutes, or back in secure bases which would make it impossible.

The fact that the information was "single source", and was included in the dossier at a late stage, first emerged after the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan reported what he had been told by the weapons scientist David Kelly...

Not until the inquiry did the public learn that the original information passed on by the Iraqi exile referred only to battlefield weapons. "It related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles," John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, told Lord Hutton.

Evidence at the inquiry showed that Mr Scarlett never used the word "munitions" in drafts of the dossier, allowing the claim to become inflated to one of WMD... The fate of the officer who provided the information remains a mystery. There are rumours that he is dead or missing.

Posted by HongPong at February 8, 2004 08:47 PM
Listed under War on Terror .