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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (39652)	3/16/2004 3:16:38 PM
From: lurqer	Respond to of 89467

Bias in "investigations"? Report: media fed faulty Iraqi intelligence By Seth Stern A newspaper investigative report published Tuesday charges that a US-funded Iraqi exile group fed global media outlets many of the still unsubstantiated claims about Iraq, in the months leading up to the Bush administration's pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau reported Tuesday the Iraqi National Congress also fed "exaggerated and fabricated" intelligence on Iraq to leading news organizations about weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda and the fate of prisoners from the first Gulf War. Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells write that the INC information "helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to [Osama] bin Laden." But in fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors and were hotly disputed by intelligence analysts within the US government. A list of the news organizationsthat based reports on the faulty information reads like a who's who of the American, Canadian, British and Australian media elite - including the New York Times, BBC, Daily Telegraph, NPR, Melbourne's The Sunday Age, and CNN. The Iraqi National Congress listed 108 articles published by such media outlets in a letter last year to the Senate Appropriations Committee, to reinforce US President George W. Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted. Knight Ridder found multiple allegations remain unsubstantiated. •Saddam collaborated for years with bin Laden and was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials said there is no evidence of operational ties between Iraq and Al-Qaida, and no evidence of an Iraqi hand in the attacks. •Iraq trained Islamists in the same hijacking techniques used in the Sept. 11 strikes and prepared them for operations against Iraq's neighbors and possibly the United States. Two senior U.S. officials said no evidence has been found to substantiate the charge. •Iraq had mobile biological warfare facilities disguised as yogurt and milk trucks and hid banned weapons production and storage facilities beneath a hospital, fake lead-lined wells and Saddam's palaces. No such facilities or vehicles have been found. Knight Ridder's investigative report comes days after a Washington Post story gave a more positive treatment of how two, key, US Defense Department offices handled prewar intelligence. The Post article casts doubt on assertions by Democrats that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans as well as its Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group supplied questionable information that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For example, the Post reports that neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees which have been investigating prewar intelligence for eight months, have found support for Democratic allegations that Pentagon analysts went out and collected their own intelligence. Nor have investigators found that the Pentagon analysis of Iraq significantly shaped the case the administration made for going to war. USA Today reported Sunday on the details of a classified Senate investigative report which said US intelligence agencies turned "vague, incomplete information into firm warnings about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction." The firmness of that finding set against the failure to find any weapons since the war, has become an embarrassment to US intelligence agencies, and led to criticism of President Bush. Though the report is still being edited and portions blacked out so it can be publicly released, Republicans and Democrats have agreed on its key findings, senators and Senate staffers said. "The picture in regards to intelligence is not very flattering," Sen. Pat Roberts, (R) of Kansas, chairman of the intelligence committee, said Sunday on CNN's Late Edition. In a pivotal report sent to Congress just before votes to authorize the use of force against Iraq in Oct. 2002, US intelligence analysts said Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons" and "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." That judgment in the estimate's opening lines came even though no Western official had seen an actual chemical or biological weapon in Iraq since 1995, USA Today reported. csmonitor.com lurqer