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Revealed: How the road
to war was paved with lies
Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and
fabricating evidence in rush to war
By Raymond
Whitaker
27 April 2003
The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons
of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration,
use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The
Independent on Sunday can reveal.
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were
furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush
to war with Iraq. "They ignored
intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a
threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said,
"Washington has to prove its case.
If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war
with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."
UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war
started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical,
biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They
found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating,
but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's
regime posed an imminent threat to the world.
On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the
former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This
was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy
Agency as crude forgeries.
On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam
would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts
released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after
pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances
of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the
"foreseeable future".
On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime
had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to
"defectors" from Iraq, without saying that
their claims – including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath
the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" – had repeatedly
been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.
On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to
destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded
the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but
last week the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had
been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.
Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to
an end – a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC
News in the US put it. "We were
not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter
of emphasis." American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in
search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the
sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such
as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the
man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in
custody.
Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received
high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to
believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from
the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of
the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.
One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical
and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that
such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled
and buried. A later Downing Street
"intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised
from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just
cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a
cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet
that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few
strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented
as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough."
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first
pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed
before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because
agents in Iraq would be endangered.
"That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the
evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."
Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money
for intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what
was needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the
whole US intelligence
effort."
Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of
both the US and British
governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after the
departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war – a possibility raised by
President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.
This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the
chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence".
An Iraqi scientist, writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a
driver in a US convoy that he had
proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi officials had
destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.
Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the
possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden
that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged
that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking
for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units
were said to have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional
weapons" – the less emotive term which is now preferred.
Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one
official said privately that "in the end, history and the American
people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of
poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked
the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".
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