Iraqi defectors' weapons claims were 'false' (NO imminent danger)

[papau]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1052334,00.html

Iraqi defectors' weapons claims were 'false'

Julian Borger, Washington
Tuesday September 30, 2003
The Guardian

US military intelligence has concluded that almost all the claims made by Iraqi defectors about Saddam Hussein's alleged secret weapons were either useless or false, it was reported yesterday.
The assessment by the Pentagon defence intelligence agency (DIA), leaked to US journalists, amounts to an indictment of the Iraqi National Congress, which brought the defectors to Washington's attention, adding to the momentum towards invasion....The leak reflects a growing backlash by the US intelligence agencies - principally the CIA, DIA and the state department's intelligence arm - whose findings and recommendations on Iraq were overruled before the war in favour of far more sensational assessments made by ideologically driven groups in the Pentagon and the vice-president's office. "All this is coming out now, because they didn't have the political spine to do it before," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of CIA counter-intelligence operations. "Now the tide has turned internally in terms of the use of intelligence before the war."

In another sign of that turning tide, the CIA director, George Tenet, has asked the justice department to investigate allegations that one or more administration officials leaked the name of a CIA analyst married to a prominent critic of the administration's Iraq policy, Joseph Wilson. <snip>

The DIA report strikes at the heart of administration's justification for going to war: that the Iraqi regime represented an imminent danger to the US because of its development of weapons of mass destruction. A report by a CIA-led search team, the Iraqi Survey Group, due to be delivered to Congress this week, is expected to confirm that no stockpiles of such weapons have been found after a six-month hunt. Much of the US and British case against Saddam was built on the testimony of defectors, and in Washingtonat least, most of those defectors were shepherded out of Iraq by the INC.
DIA officials interviewed about half a dozen defectors in European capitals and in the Kurdish-run northern city of Irbil in late 2002 and 2003. They brought with them claims that Saddam was continuing to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons underground and undetected by UN inspectors. But according to the DIA report, only a third of the information they provided was of any interest, and most of the leads arising from the rest proved groundless.

The INC defectors were largely spurned by the CIA and state department, who believed they were concocting stories in the hope of being resettled in the US. But they won an enthusiastic audience in the Pentagon's office of special plans (OSP), set up after September 11, which became a parallel civilian channel for intelligence on Iraq, operating independently of the uniformed officers running the DIA. According to yesterday's edition of Time magazine, the INC's American representative in Washington, Francis Brooke, was in weekly contact with the head of the OSP, William Luti, in the build-up to the war.<snip>

The OSP has been disbanded since the war, but its staff remains at work under different titles in the Pentagon.

[pbeal]

1. Does anyone here not know this by now?

This has been reported over and over and over again it never seems to get ant traction.

[ewagner]

2. This was the interesting part:

The assessment by the Pentagon defence intelligence agency (DIA), leaked to US journalists, amounts to an indictment of the Iraqi National Congress, which brought the defectors to Washington's attention, adding to the momentum towards invasion....

Leaked to US Journalists recently? Did I miss something?

Of course, the good people here at DU have been screaming about this for I don't know how long, but I haven't seen this make the top headlines on any of the news networks.

[papau]

3. "staff remains at work under different titles in the Pentagon"- a solution

often seen in the Corporate world for those that work for a powerful mentor - and screw up!

[gratuitous]

4. Gee, wouldn't it have been nice

Maybe we should have done something to find this out before we killed thousands of people, wounded or maimed tens of thousands more, and spent $150 billion we don't have?

Golly, if only someone had tried to warn the Bush administration beforehand!

[Paschall]

5. And how much money have we shoved Chalabi's way...

...over the years?

[ewagner]

6. Late Post but nevertheless

Just heard this story on Talk of the Nation. A former CIA Head of Counter Terrorism says that we spent in excess of $100 Million on INC (Chalabi's group) for intelligence gathering, most of that intelligence went directly to the Pentagon, bypassing CIA, and FBI.

Sounds like a lot of money for nothing!