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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (139673)	7/10/2004 2:12:38 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<I don't hate Middle Easterners. I just don't believe anything they tell me that I can't verify with my own eyes.> Like Chalabi? Where do you think the "intelligence" for our invasion came from -- that is right, from "lying bastards" as you put it. Perhaps we should have verified some of the horse manure we were being fed before sending our children to die in Iraq.

To: Ilaine who wrote (139673)	7/10/2004 3:42:22 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts By JIM DWYER Published: July 9, 2004 Shortly after President Bush declared war on terrorism in the fall of 2001, the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, sent out a simple, urgent message to its network of intelligence agents: find evidence of outlawed weapons that would make Saddam Hussein a prime target for the United States. Inevitably, that request reached Muhammad al-Zubaidi, himself an Iraqi exile who had been working to undermine Mr. Hussein for 24 years from posts in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq. Under the playful name of Al Deeb - Arabic for The Wolf - Mr. Zubaidi, now 52, served as a field leader for about 75 to 100 people who collected information on the machinations of Iraq's police state. Over the next three months, Mr. Zubaidi and his associates gathered statements from defectors who said they had knowledge of Mr. Hussein's military facilities and who had fled Iraq for neighboring countries. In short order, that same group of defectors took their stories to American intelligence agents and journalists. The defectors spoke of a nation pocketed with mobile weapons laboratories, a new secret weapons site beneath a Baghdad hospital, a meeting between a member of Mr. Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden - accounts that ultimately became potent elements in Mr. Bush's case for war. Those accusations remain unproven. In fact, Mr. Zubaidi said in interviews last week in Lebanon, the ominous claims by the defectors differed significantly from the versions that they had first related to him and his associates. Mr. Zubaidi provided his handwritten diaries from 2001 and 2002, and his existing reports on the statements originally made by the defectors. According to the documents, the defectors, while speaking with precision about aspects of Iraqi military facilities like its stock of missiles, did not initially make some of the most provocative claims about weapons production or that an Iraqi official had met with Mr. bin Laden. The precise circumstances under which the stories apparently changed remains unclear. The defectors themselves could not be reached for comment. Mr. Zubaidi contends that the men altered their stories after they met with senior figures in the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Zubaidi, who acknowledged that he had a bitter split with the I.N.C. in April 2003, said officials of the group prepped the defectors before allowing them to meet with the American intelligence agents and journalists. "They intentionally exaggerated all the information so they would drag the United States into war," Mr. Zubaidi said. "We all know the defectors had a little information on which they built big stories." Yesterday, Nabil Musawi, one of Mr. Chalabi's deputies who met with the defectors, said that Mr. Zubaidi's assertions were "childish," and bore no relation to reality. He said it was not the role of Mr. Zubaidi or his associates to do full debriefings of the defectors. Nor was it the responsibility of the I.N.C. to grade the reliability of each defector, he said. "Whether the defector failed or succeeded, it meant nothing to us," Mr. Musawi said, speaking by phone from Jordan. "There's no question we wanted to indict the regime, but I wish we had someone clever enough to sit down and come up with stories." For a short time last year, Mr. Zubaidi was in the spotlight, immediately after the old government was toppled in April 2003. Acting in the power vacuum of those early days, he tried to form a civil administration in Baghdad with himself as the executive, an effort that lasted about two weeks before he was taken into custody by the United States military for 12 days and ordered to desist. He later was arrested again and held for about five months. He said he believed his former colleagues at the Iraqi National Congress were behind his jailing, an assumption Mr. Musawi says is not true. Since February, Mr. Zubaidi has been living quietly outside Beirut. He said he had not publicly discussed details of his role in locating defectors until he was contacted by The New York Times last month. He agreed to be interviewed at length, and to make available any records that had not been confiscated by the American military forces. nytimes.com

To: Ilaine who wrote (139673)	7/10/2004 4:16:01 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

Officials used claims to build war support May 18, 2004 BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for an Iraq invasion by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector, although a lie-detector test indicated he was lying and U.S. intelligence agencies had rejected him as unreliable months earlier. The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he had worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the CIA-operated Iraq Survey Group, charged with tracing any illegal weapons held by ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials said. "The overall impression was that he was trying to pass information far beyond his area of expertise," a senior U.S. official said. He and another U.S. official spoke on condition of anonymity because some details of the defector's case remain classified. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that other defectors fed him and the CIA misleading information about mobile biological weapons facilities before the war. "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that I am disappointed, and I regret it," Powell said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." While no evidence has surfaced that administration officials knowingly fed dubious information to Congress, the public or the news media, Saeed's case suggests that officials either were unaware that he had done poorly on the CIA-administered polygraph exam or overlooked that fact when they publicized his claims. In making its case for war, the administration also publicized claims about mobile biological weapons labs from a defector whom the Defense Intelligence Agency had labeled a fabricator and a charge that Hussein had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa, even though the CIA had said it couldn't verify the charge. The White House gave Saeed's claims prominent billing in a September 2002 background paper -- nine months after officials with the CIA and DIA had dismissed him as unreliable. The paper was released in conjunction with a speech President George W. Bush delivered at the UN General Assembly and is still available on the White House and State Department Web sites. [ST: I guess the White House did not want to mislead people and was just very naive due to the superior lying skills of Iraqis.] A footnote in one version attributes Saeed's claims to a Dec. 20, 2001, front-page article in the New York Times that was based on an interview with the defector in Bangkok, Thailand. In the article, Saeed described himself as a civil engineer who worked on renovating secret biological, chemical and nuclear weapons facilities in fake lead-lined water wells, private villas and beneath Baghdad's main hospital. "Mr. Saeed's account gives new clues about the types and possible locations of illegal laboratories, facilities and storage sites that American officials and international inspectors have long suspected Iraq of trying to hide," the newspaper said. The article, cited by news media around the world, appeared three days after CIA and DIA experts dismissed Saeed as unreliable after the polygraph test detected lies, the U.S. officials said. Like two other Iraqi defectors Powell cited Sunday, Saeed was supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group that lobbied the United States to oust Hussein. The group's leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. INC spokesman Entifadh Qanbar and other INC officials denied that the group knowingly provided defectors of dubious credibility. The paper, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," can be found on the White House Web site at www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf .

To: Ilaine who wrote (139673)	7/10/2004 4:30:05 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 281500

> If I said that "Muslims lie," that was not what I intended to say, exactly. I thought I said "Middle Easterners lie." Thanks for clarifying your prejudice. I thought it was religion based but now I know it is racial...thought I still don't know what you mean by the "exactly" part. How do you feel about Christian Middle Easterners? Or is the "eaxctly" qualifier meant to exclude Israel and Turkey? > Lying in court isn't uncommon, but this is above and beyond, it's something that astonishes the people Actually this means they are not good liars because clearly you have all been able to tell the lies. Perhaps you can provide some stats on perjury convictions for ME versus other regions. > Nevertheless, it seems perverse to accuse me of singling out Middle Easterners. This is stuff that long predates 9/11. So you were racist long before 9/11. Why is it perverse? > When I helped represent the local taxicab drivers union, our secretary, who was incredibly liberal, loved people from all parts of the world, but hated Middle Easterners. You know what they say...birds of a feather flock together. Yet another racist who claims to be loving and liberal. Why am I not surprised. > Unlike her, I don't hate Middle Easterners. I just don't believe anything they tell me that I can't verify with my own eyes. Wonderful!!! I just wish the White House was as skeptical as you about those Iraqi reports they got...oh wait, they just couldn't tell the lie because Iraqis were so good at it...so good that even your secretary could tell they lied but the trusting people those White House folks are, they just believed every little thing some Iraqi defector told them and used it to build a case for the war...you are funny.