[Media-watch] How the road to war was paved with lies

[Miriam Poves]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=400805



Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies

Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating 
evidence in rush to war

By Raymond Whitaker

27 April 2003


The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was 
based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known 
to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can 
reveal.

A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both 
sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political 
leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored 
intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. 
Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has 
to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it 
paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own 
conclusions."

UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for 
four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles 
capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that 
Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American 
assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the 
world.

On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime 
sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. 
This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy 
Agency as crude forgeries.

On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use 
weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released 
were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after 
pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 
was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances 
of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future".

On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN 
Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile 
laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, 
without saying that their claims – including one of a "secret biological 
laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" – had 
repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.

On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, 
despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned 
Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of 
State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the 
war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass 
destruction campaign was simply a means to an end – a "global show of 
American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not 
lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." 
American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of 
definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites 
considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as 
Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the 
man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in 
custody.

Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security 
briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had 
the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of 
war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released 
highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.

One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy 
chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon 
said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been 
dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was 
shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic 
publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and 
ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved 
officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is 
a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on 
Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good 
enough."

Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out 
Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to 
have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would 
be endangered. "That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with 
the evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."

Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from Ahmed 
Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for 
intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what was 
needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the whole US 
intelligence effort."

Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US 
and British governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed 
after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war – a possibility 
raised by President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.

This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN 
weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence". An Iraqi scientist, 
writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy 
that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi 
officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.

Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that 
they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could 
take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four 
American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to 
other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to 
have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional weapons" – the less 
emotive term which is now preferred.

Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one 
official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people 
will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas 
or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the 
beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".







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