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. A DIA official would not confirm or deny the report’s existence yesterday, saying any such document would be classified, but adding: ”Any intelligence we get from an individual we never use as a sole source but we add it to our database.
”We don’t make decisions or take action based on sole sources.”
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.
Wilson, a former ambassador and a member of the national security council, has said he believes the leak came direct from the White House, and has hinted that one of the sources could have been President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
The White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said: ”There has been absolutely nothing brought to our attention that suggests White House involvement.”
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.
Neither Brooke nor the INC office in Washington returned calls yesterday.
The OSP has been disbanded since the war, but its staff remains at work under different titles in the Pentagon. – Guardian Unlimited Â