Intelligence officials are reexamining data used in justifying the war. They say Hussein's regime may have sent bogus defectors.
WASHINGTON — Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.
The goal, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We're reinterviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S."
Although senior CIA officials insist defectors were only partly responsible for the intelligence that triggered the decision to invade Iraq last March, other intelligence officials now fear that key portions of the pre-war intelligence may have been flawed.
As evidence, officials say former Iraqi intelligence operatives have confirmed since the war that Saddam's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.
....There is growing concern, said another U.S. intelligence official, that "people were just telling us what we wanted to hear."
...."We were prisoners of our own beliefs," said a senior U.S. weapons expert who recently returned from a stint with the survey group. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."
These defectors were a key part of the WMD case made by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, despite warnings from conventional intelligence sources — i.e., people who actually had significant experience with real intelligence — that Chalabi and the defectors were not reliable. In fact, as we now know, the "dot connecting" done by the OSP was almost completely useless.
Why was Saddam trying to trick the US into thinking he was building WMD? The leading theory is that it made him look like a power in the Arab world. Without the perception that he had WMD, he was just another tinpot dictator.
However, this is certainly one of the key questions of the whole WMD affair, that's for sure.
This leads to another interesting question: Does the OSP still exist? If so, why? DOD Intelligence = Oxymoron to the Max!
Demetrios says If what this article says is true, then our nation is a laughingstock. We used to be respected and feared. After Bush's behavior and lies in pushing for this invasion, we are not very much respected anymore. With our military tied down in the desert, and news that our leaders may have been played by a tinhorn dictator, you have to wonder if we can even claim to strike fear in the hearts of the bad guys anymore.
What a legacy for our children. Neocons stole my son's birthright.
