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How the road to war was paved
amatullah
05/02/03 at 21:51:25
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=400805

The Independent
27 April 2003

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

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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