Leopold on the Murky Sources

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White House Used Info from Iraqi Exiles in Bush's Speech
by Jason Leopold
July 29, 2003




Last weekend, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained that the
United States at times relied on "murky" intelligence in trying to link Iraq
to the al-Qaeda terrorist group, but the war against Iraq was justified
despite the fact that the White House is now being dogged by questions about
the accuracy of its prewar intelligence.

"The nature of terrorism intelligence is intrinsically murky," Wolfowitz
said on "Meet the Press." "If you wait until the terrorism picture is clear,
you're going to wait until after something terrible has happened."

But the reasons behind the murky intelligence used by the White House to
build a case for war against Iraq may have more to do with the people who
provided the Pentagon and the White House with its information on Iraq's
alleged weapons of mass destruction than the difficulties the intelligence
community already faces in trying to obtain reliable intelligence from a
variety of sources.

"Having concluded that international inspectors are unlikely to find
tangible and irrefutable evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass
destruction, the Bush administration is preparing its own assessment that
will rely heavily on evidence from Iraqi defectors, according to senior
administration officials," The New York Times reported Jan. 23.

In addition, Bush administration officials said Jan. 23 some of the
intelligence information provided by the Iraqi defectors would likely be
included in the president's State of the Union address, which may explain
why the White House has come under fire for failing to paint an accurate
picture of the Iraqi threat - it is well-known among intelligence experts
that much of the information provided by Iraqi defectors is unreliable.

"The White House asked administration intelligence analysts . to use the
information from the defectors as part of a 'bill of particulars' that the
administration hopes will convince skeptical allies and the American public
that Iraq's behavior warrants military action, the officials said," the
Times reported. "In addition, they said, it may be incorporated into
President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28."

Many of the defectors were encouraged to speak to intelligence officials by
Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group with
close ties to the White House. There continue to be deep divisions in
Washington over the value of information from defectors associated with
Chalabi's group.

"The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency has been the most receptive to
the defectors intelligence, saying that defectors are critical to
penetrating Iraq's deceptive practices. The CIA has often been dismissive of
the defectors and questioned their credibility, according to administration
officials," the Times reported.

As lawmakers in Washington begin investigations into the accuracy of pre-war
intelligence, they should question whether the White House and the Pentagon
used dubious information from Iraqi defectors to help sway public opinion in
supporting the war and whether some of that information was included in
Bush's State of the Union address in January.

Five days before President's Bush's State of the Union Speech Jan. 28,
Wolfowitz spoke to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York and credited
Iraqi defectors with providing the Pentagon and other U.S. "intelligence
agencies" much of the information on Iraq's secret weapons programs that has
long been dismissed by military personnel in Iraq as unreliable.

Wolfowitz said in his Jan. 23, presentation to the Council of Foreign
Relations that it was Iraqi defectors who told the CIA and the Pentagon
about mobile trailers in Iraq that were allegedly used to produce biological
weapons.

"We know about that capability from defectors and other sources," Wolfowitz
said during his speech. "For a great body of what we need to know, we are
very dependent on traditional methods of intelligence - that is to say,
human beings who are either deliberately or inadvertently communicating to
us."

Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February presentation to the United
Nations where he was trying to win support for war, pointed to the trailers
as evidence of Iraq's secret weapons program.

When the trailers were found in May, President Bush, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were quick to
point out that the trailers were used to produce lethal chemical weapons,
even though no traces of any chemical weapons were found inside the
trailers.

But the State Department in a June 2 classified memorandum disputed the
conclusion that the trailers were used to cook up deadly weapons. United
Nations weapons inspectors said that the trailers were likely used to
produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

Prior to the war in March, Wolfowitz said some of the most valuable
information it received came from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a contractor
who escaped Iraq in the summer of 2001. He told American officials that
chemical and biological weapons laboratories were hidden beneath hospitals
and inside presidential palaces and he provided documents to back up some of
his other assertions about Iraq's weapons programs.

In December and January, the White House highlighted Haideri's claims
against Iraq in a report called "Iraq; A Decade of Deception and Defiance"
and in a fact sheet on Iraq posted on the White Houses web site. But when
U.S. forces searched the hospitals and presidential palaces where Haideri
said weapons were hidden they found nothing, not even evidence that weapons
had ever been there.


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Jason Leopold is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
He is currently finishing a book on the California energy crisis.



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