|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
U.S. Promoted Iraqi WMD Claims Despite CIA Doubts Over Source’s Credibility
The Bush administration publicly trumpeted WMD-related claims made by an Iraqi defector prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, months after the defector had been rejected by U.S. intelligence after performing poorly on a lie-detector test, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday (see GSN, May 17). Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri claimed to have worked at chemical, biological and nuclear sites around Baghdad. The White House included Saeed’s claims in a 2002 background paper on prewar Iraq that is still available on both the White House and State Department Web sites, the Inquirer reported. A footnote in one version of the background paper attributes Saeed’s claims to a 2001 New York Times article, in which the defector described himself as an engineer who had worked on renovating secret WMD-related facilities (see GSN, Dec. 20, 2001). The Times article appeared just days after CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency experts determined that Saeed was unreliable after a poor performance in a CIA-administered polygraph test, U.S. officials said. When members of the Iraq Survey Group, currently conducting the search for evidence of prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he was unable to identify a single site associated with weapons of mass destruction. “The overall impression was that he was trying to pass information far beyond his area of expertise,” a senior U.S. official said. Saeed was made available to U.S. intelligence through the Iraqi National Congress, a former opposition group that has been heavily criticized for providing inaccurate information on prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts (Jonathan Landay, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18). U.S. officials said yesterday that the Defense Department would cease by the end of June paying the group more than $300,000 per month for information-collecting activities, the London Independent reported. “After 30 June, we expect all funding by U.S. agencies to be ceased because the Iraqi government will be sovereign,” INC spokesman Entifadh Qanbar said (Andrew Buncombe, London Independent, May 19). SarinMeanwhile, Defense Department officials said yesterday that an artillery shell used in a roadside bombing in Iraq this week contained about a gallon of sarin, according to the New York Post (see GSN, May 18). Two preliminary tests have been conducted on the shell and further testing still needs to be performed at a U.S. laboratory before a conclusion can be made, officials said. The preliminary findings were alarming enough, however, that U.S. military teams are investigating the shell’s origins amid concerns that militants in Iraq may be planning to conduct attacks using Iraq’s alleged prewar WMD stockpile, the Post reported. “Not only have we found weapons of mass destruction, but they are in the hands of the exact people we don’t want them in the hands of. They may use them and not know what they have,” Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) said. A gallon of sarin could kill hundreds of people if used in an enclosed space such as a subway station or building, according to Michael Powers of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute (Niles Lathem, New York Post, May 19).
| ||||||||||
Back to top
