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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (413792)	6/11/2003 9:07:09 AM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 769670

Add one more lie to the list: CIA had doubts on Iraq link to al-Qaida Tuesday, June 10 @ 09:59:44 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian The debunking of the Bush administration's pre-war certainties on Iraq gathered pace yesterday when it emerged that the CIA knew for months that a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida was highly unlikely. As President George Bush was forced for the second time in days to defend the decision to go to war, a new set of leaks from CIA officials suggested a tendency in the White House to suppress or ignore intelligence findings which did not shore up the case for war. The interrogation reports of two senior al-Qaida members, both in US custody, showed that the CIA had reason to doubt the allegations of a connection between Saddam's regime and the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Such assertions, promoted vigorously by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, were used as an additional justification for war, after the central argument that Iraq's arsenal of banned weapons posed an imminent danger. The charge of a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam was contentious even at the time, and yesterday's report in the New York Times that the two al-Qaida members, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, dismissed the idea deepened the impression that Americans had been deliberately misled to support the decision for war. In recent days that impression has become sufficiently widespread to put officials on the defensive. Yesterday Mr Bush predicted that US inspectors scouring Iraq would soon find evidence of a programme of weapons of mass destruction. He also reaffirmed that al-Qaida maintained a network in Baghdad. "Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons programme," Mr Bush said. "I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons programme." That assertion stops well short of Mr Bush's statement during a visit to Poland on May 31 that US troops had already found weapons of mass destruction: two trailers the US said at the time had been used as mobile biological labs. With the White House fighting for its credibility, the New York Times reported that the two al-Qaida lieutenants had dismissed the notion of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden. Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March last year, told his CIA interrogators that Bin Laden had considered and then rejected the idea of working with Saddam because he did not want to be in the Iraqi leader's debt. His information was supported on the eve of war after Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan on March 1. Mohammed, who had been al-Qaida's chief of operations, told the CIA the group did not work with Saddam. While the CIA shared its interrogation record of Zubaydah with other intelligence agencies, it did not release its conclusions to the public. That omission could prove extremely damaging to the administration because it suggests that officials ignored intelligence that did not fit with their plans for Iraq. "This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official told the New York Times. "Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted." Reprinted from The Guardian: guardian.co.uk

To: jlallen who wrote (413792)	6/11/2003 9:12:42 AM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Running out of places to look: U.S. hunt for Iraqi banned weapons slows Tuesday, June 10 @ 10:02:31 EDT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Dafna Linzer, Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found. After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents. "It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future." Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home. Of the seven Site Survey Teams charged with carrying out the search, only two have assignments for the coming week — but not at suspected weapons sites. Lt. Col. Ronald Haan, who runs team 6, is using the time to run his troops through a training exercise. "At least it's keeping the guys busy," he said. The slowdown comes after checks of more than 230 sites — drawn from a master intelligence list compiled before the war — turned up none of the chemical or biological weapons the Bush administration said it went after Saddam Hussein to destroy. Still, President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to make weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons program," he said. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said work will resume at a brisk pace once its 1,300-person Iraq Survey Group takes over. Ahead of the war, planners were so certain of the intelligence that the weapons teams were designed simply to secure chemical and biological weapons rather than investigate their whereabouts, as U.N. inspectors had done. But without evidence of weapons, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have begun reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the administration before the March invasion of Iraq. Government inquiries are being set up in Washington, London and other coalition countries to examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the decision for war. "The smoking guns just weren't lying out in the open," said David Gai, spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group. "There's a lot more detective work that needs to be done." The group will work more along the model of U.N. weapons inspectors. Future sites in the search will be compiled from intelligence gathered in the field, and the teams will be reconfigured to include more civilian scientists and engineers, Gai said. Several former U.N. inspectors from the United States, Britain and Australia, who know many of Iraq's top weapons experts, will also be brought in. Led by Keith Dayton, a two-star general from Defense intelligence, the Iraq Survey Group is settling into headquarters in Qatar rather than Iraq. However, it will maintain a large presence of analysts and experts on the same palace grounds outside Baghdad where the weapons hunters are based. Several dozen staffers have moved to the palace and into other buildings, now being turned into classified document centers, living quarters and office space for the Iraq Survey Group. With prewar intelligence exhausted and senior figures from the former regime insisting Iraq hasn't had chemical or biological weapons in years, Dayton's staff will be starting from scratch. "We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved. We've gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday. Intelligence agents and weapons hunters have been speaking with scientists and experts for the past month, but those interviews have not led the teams to any illegal weapons and none of the tips provided by Iraqis have panned out. U.N. inspectors spent years learning the names and faces of the Iraqi weapons programs. But in postwar Iraq, the Bush administration cut the organization out of the hunt because of recent assessments that conflicted with Washington's portrayal of Saddam's weapons. Relations soured further amid reports that U.S. troops failed to secure Iraq's largest nuclear facility from looters. This week, a U.N. nuclear team returned to Iraq to survey the damage at Tuwaitha — where 2 tons of uranium had been stored for more than a decade. They began scanning the facility and its equipment for leaking radiation and signs of missing uranium. One weapons team, specializing in nuclear materials, has been tasked to accompany the U.N. experts until they leave on June 25.