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Iraqi exile group fed news media false information
Miami Herald/Knight Ridder Newspapers ^ | 3/15/2004 | JONATHAN S. LANDAY and TISH WELLS

Posted on 03/16/2004 6:47:49 AM PST by JohnGalt

Iraqi exile group fed news media false information

By JONATHAN S. LANDAY and TISH WELLS

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.

The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.

In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.

Other Iraqi groups made similar allegations about Iraq's links to terrorism and hidden weapons that also found their way into official administration statements and into news reports, including several by Knight Ridder.

Knight Ridder, which obtained a copy of the INC letter, reviewed all of the articles in what the document called a "summary of ICP product cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (October 2001-May 2002)."

The articles made numerous assertions that so far haven't been substantiated 11 months after Baghdad fell, including charges that:

Saddam collaborated for years with bin Laden and was complicit in the Sept. 11, 2001, 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 Islamic extremists 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 that so far 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 so far.

Iraq held 80 Kuwaitis captured in the 1991 Gulf War in a secret underground prison in 2000. No Kuwaiti prisoners have been found so far.

Iraq could launch toxin-armed Scud missiles at Israel that could kill 100,000 people and was aggressively developing nuclear weapons. No Iraq Scud missiles have been found yet.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, missing since the 1991 Gulf war, was seen alive in Baghdad in 1998. The case remains unresolved, but the Navy last week said there was no evidence that Speicher was ever held in captivity.

According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared included The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly, The Times of London, The Sunday Times of London, The Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight Ridder newspapers, The Kansas City Star and The Philadelphia Daily News. The Associated Press and others also wrote stories based on INC-provided materials.

Other U.S. and international news media picked up some of the articles. By mid-January 2002, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans favored military force to oust Saddam.

Many of the stories noted that the information they contained couldn't be independently verified.

In at least one case, the INC made a defector available to a journalist before his information had been fully reviewed by U.S. intelligence officials.

The defector, an engineer, Adnan Ihsan al Haideri, claimed in a Dec. 20, 2001, New York Times article by Judith Miller that there were biological, nuclear and chemical warfare facilities under private villas, the Saddam Hussein Hospital and fake water wells around Baghdad.

Senior U.S. officials said U.S. arms inspectors have found no fake wells or a laboratory under the hospital. Some secret rooms have been located under villas, mosques and palaces, but the officials, who asked not to be identified, said they weren't among locations that al Haideri claimed to know about.

Several requests to The New York Times to speak to Miller were not answered.

INC leader Ahmad Chalabi and other officials have insisted that the group screened all defectors as thoroughly as they could.

U.S. intelligence officials have determined that virtually all of the defectors' information was marginal or useless, and that some of the defectors were fabricators or embellished the threat from Saddam.

Many of the articles relied on interviews with the same defectors, who appeared to change facts with each telling. For instance, one defector first appeared in several stories as an Iraqi army former captain, but a later story said he was a major.

Another defector told one interviewer that the aircraft fuselage on which Islamic extremists received training in hijacking belonged to a Boeing 707 and was quoted in a later story as saying that it came from a Russian-made Tupolev.

Intelligence debriefers look for such differences when trying to determine the reliability of defectors, who sometimes exaggerate their importance or try to tell interviewers what they think the interviewers want to hear.

The Information Collection Program (ICP) was financed out of the more than $18 million that Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, between 1999 and 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.

The INC letter said that it fed ICP information to Arab and Western news media and to two officials in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, the leading invasion advocates.

The information bypassed U.S. intelligence channels and reached the recipients even after CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI officers questioned the accuracy of the materials or the motives of those who supplied them.

Some of the information, such as the charge that Iraq ran a terrorist training camp in Salman Pak, found its way into administration statements, including a Sept. 12, 2002, White House paper.

The CIA and the State Department had long viewed the INC as unreliable.

Some articles cited in the INC letter were based on transcripts the INC provided. An article in The Kansas City Star, for example, quoted an unidentified INC member as saying he had information that Speicher was seen alive in Baghdad in 1998.

A March 17, 2002, Sunday Times of London article on Saddam's alleged illicit weapons was based on a 3,000-page transcript of the preliminary INC debriefing of al Haideri.

The article also reported claims in a videotaped interview made by unnamed Iraqi opposition officials with a second defector that Saddam had mobile biological warfare laboratories disguised as milk and yogurt trucks. Such vehicles have yet to be found.

Marie Colvin, a co-author of the article, said the INC insisted to her that all defectors were scrutinized as fully as possible before being passed on, and that it was up to reporters to decide how to use their information.

"I believe they acted in good faith," she said. "Over seven years, I would not say there was a story I was fooled on."

Many articles quoted defectors as saying that Saddam was training extremists from throughout the Muslim world at Salman Pak, outside Baghdad.

"We certainly have found nothing to substantiate that," said a senior U.S. official.

Instead, he said, U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Iraqi counterterrorism units practiced anti-hijacking techniques on an aircraft fuselage at the site.

An Oct. 12, 2001, Washington Post opinion piece by columnist Jim Hoagland quoted an INC-supplied defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, as saying that Salman Pak offered hijacking and assassination courses.

The article, which urged the Bush administration to examine possible Iraqi complicity in Sept. 11, said Alami was a former military instructor and ex-army captain whom the INC tracked down to Fort Worth, Texas, where he settled in May 2001 as a refugee.

Hoagland's column said the defector should not be automatically believed. Hoagland said he wrote it to call attention to "the difficulties that two defectors had in receiving an evaluation from the CIA."

In a Nov. 11 story in the Observer of London by David Rose, Alami was quoted as saying that "the method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp."

The article said Alami was assigned to Salman Pak between 1994 and 1995.

However, a Nov. 8, 2001, New York Times article said Alami worked at Salman Pak for eight years.

The Oct. 12, 2001, Washington Post piece also cited an INC claim that an unnamed former Iraqi intelligence officer claimed that "Islamists" were trained at Salman Pak on a U.S.-made Boeing 707.

In a later article, which appeared to be based on an interview with the same man, the aircraft was identified as an old Russian-made Tupolev.

That defector complained in The Washington Post column that CIA interrogators in Ankara had treated him "dismissively" earlier that week.

The Nov. 8, 2001, New York Times article featured an interview in an unidentified Middle East country that was arranged by the INC with an unidentified Iraqi lieutenant general who said he'd been interviewed by the CIA in Ankara the previous month.

He and an unidentified Iraqi intelligence service sergeant claimed they worked at Salman Pak for several years and that trainees were being prepared for attacks on neighboring countries and possibly the United States.

The unnamed lieutenant general appears to have been the defector of the same rank, code-named Abu Zeinab, who was featured in the Nov. 11, 2001, Observer article.

The newspaper said the defector was interviewed by telephone, and that it was also given details of an interview that two London-based INC activists had conducted with Abu Zeinab at a safe house in Ankara, Turkey.

Abu Zeinab claimed that trainees were instructed in hijacking aircraft.

The defector's full name, Abu Zeinab al Qurairy, was revealed in a February 2002 article in Vanity Fair magazine that was also written by Rose, who declined to comment.

The defector said the Islamists at Salman Pak pledged to obey orders to carry out suicide attacks and that those who flunked training were "used as targets in live-ammunition exercises."

Al Qurairy said in one exercise, students had to land helicopters on a speeding train and then hijack it.

A list of the 108 articles that the Iraqi National Congress says were based on information it supplied to news media is available on the web at www.krwashington.com.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Extended News
KEYWORDS: chalabi; cheney; feathers; feith; iraq; prewarintelligence; tar; treason; wolfowitz
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Whoever let this scoundrel Chalabi infect the institutions of our fair republic must be held accountable.
1 posted on 03/16/2004 6:47:52 AM PST by JohnGalt
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To: JohnGalt
Caution, here. This story has all the earmarks of a disgruntled State Dept/CIA plant -- in other words, it comes from elements in those departments that have opposed modernization of the military and other Bush administration policies. And if you've bought the notion of Chalabi as a "scoundrel," you've bought that point of view.
2 posted on 03/16/2004 7:04:15 AM PST by MoralSense
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To: MoralSense
Another Chalabi Republican...
3 posted on 03/16/2004 7:06:18 AM PST by JohnGalt (What tale will serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? -- R. Kipling)
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To: billbears; u-89; Burkeman1
*ping*
4 posted on 03/16/2004 7:14:39 AM PST by JohnGalt (What tale will serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? -- R. Kipling)
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To: MoralSense
I think Blix may be the source of this story. He's been saying this all over the airwaves as he promotes his new book.
5 posted on 03/16/2004 7:16:32 AM PST by freeperfromnj
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To: JohnGalt
I dont doubt that some of this stuff happened. Hey, they were eager to get rid of Saddam. Its too bad that Saddam was bad enough to want to get rid of without having to resort to this sort of thing. It taints things a bit. Its like a bogus drug charge against Jeffrey Dahmer.
6 posted on 03/16/2004 7:28:17 AM PST by Paradox (I have NO idea..)
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To: Paradox
Worse, the skeptical patriot must inquire as to what kind of people believed that their agenda was so important that they had to use manipulation via this Chalabi character in order to secure political support for the war. Those are not the actions of patriots.

Bush has to deal with this troubling element within his administration.
7 posted on 03/16/2004 7:32:14 AM PST by JohnGalt (What tale will serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? -- R. Kipling)
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To: JohnGalt
So what! Who cares!

This intelligence crap is a BIG SO WHAT - except for those who want to discredit the effort to remove this enemy.

We have removed one less enemy that we should have removed 10 years earlier.
8 posted on 03/16/2004 7:35:53 AM PST by LibFreeUSA
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To: JohnGalt
The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden,---

Bush NEVER said that!!!!
9 posted on 03/16/2004 7:38:08 AM PST by RandallFlagg (<a href="http://www.michaelmoore.com" target="_blank">miserable failure)
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To: LibFreeUSA
I always laugh when people think that the government tells any of us what it really knows. We may know ten years from now, if ever.

The Miami Herald sure as heck doesn't know!
10 posted on 03/16/2004 7:39:14 AM PST by Constantine XIII
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To: Constantine XIII
Can you imagine if this crap went on back in WWII. If the Republicans back then had acted against Roosevelt like the RATS have done against Bush now, we'd still be trying to figure out how to invade Normandy!
11 posted on 03/16/2004 7:42:02 AM PST by LibFreeUSA
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To: JohnGalt
Worse, the skeptical patriot must inquire as to what kind of people believed that their agenda was so important

Not so important. So Complex. We know, definitively that Hussein actively supported, in material ways, Arafat, and the PLO. Both, Iraq, and the PLO were soviet client states once upon a time. So Hussein directly supported terrorism.

Going a step further, there are definitive links between several supposed Al Queda terrorists, and Occupied Kuwait, this also reeks of Husseini involvement.

The Possibility more than exists that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Ramzi Yousef both were far closer to Secular Iraq, than Fundamentalist OBL. A quick glimpse at their personal habits as described my the media says as much.

If KSM was the operational commander and No.3 at AQ, and HE was linked to Iraq, via occupied Kuwait, and He is the Brother of Ramzi Yousefs mother, and we know that there was Iraqi involvement in WTC1, What does that say about Al Queda as constituted on 9/12/2001.

12 posted on 03/16/2004 7:52:28 AM PST by hobbes1 (Hobbes1TheOmniscient® "I know everything so you don't have to" ;)
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To: hobbes1
It's a bogeyman story designed to scare to soccermoms into politically supporting a particular policy, in this case a war 10,000 miles away in order to achieve geopolitcal goals of a US presence in the Middle East.
13 posted on 03/16/2004 7:55:19 AM PST by JohnGalt (What tale will serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? -- R. Kipling)
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To: JohnGalt
No, Remember what Wolfowitz said awhile back.


There were several reasons, but WMD was the one that was actually translatable.
14 posted on 03/16/2004 8:01:34 AM PST by hobbes1 (Hobbes1TheOmniscient® "I know everything so you don't have to" ;)
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To: LibFreeUSA
Right On lib free,,, And incidentally,

The lead says the media were "fed" this phony intell..
What happened to their principles of checking the validity of the story and their sources with 2 or more unimpeachable sources???? Could it be they were selling newspapers/airtime??? Caveat Emptor!
15 posted on 03/16/2004 8:02:55 AM PST by late bloomer ( Neglegere homo pone aulaeum)
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To: JohnGalt
And no, not geopolitical goals. Legitimate National Security.


Iraq was definitely involved in the first Trade Center Bombing, we KNOW that. But the Administration in '93, changed terrorism from consideration as State Sponsored to Criminal Concerns (which is the most important issue in this years election).

We already had a prescence in the East, in Saudi Arabia, and we were actively warring in Iraq, enforcing the No Fly Zones. This in and of itself was sapping vital stregnth that needed to be freed up to police the War on Terror.

And You surely cant be falling into that whole "Bush conjured up the WMD argument" when the world is replete with instances of EVERYONE being on baord with the idea that they existed, from all Democrats to the UN, to Eurotrash leaders, prior to Bushs election.
16 posted on 03/16/2004 8:06:31 AM PST by hobbes1 (Hobbes1TheOmniscient® "I know everything so you don't have to" ;)
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To: hobbes1
The internationalists all agreed that Iraq was bad. Clinton needed a convenient country to bomb to distract the citizenry from his troubles at home so there was general agreement from professional Washington out to the Council on Foreign Relations that Saddam was a legit target for regime change/ nation building.

Because the Right, Bush's base, does not support nation building, the national security angle was stressed in order to gather support from Bush rightwing base.

But to believe there were no geopolitical goals is naive beyond 8th grade.

BTW, since Wolfowitz declaration that WMDs was the general reason, and there were no WMDs, why are we still there?
17 posted on 03/16/2004 8:11:34 AM PST by JohnGalt (What tale will serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young? -- R. Kipling)
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To: JohnGalt
Poor Saddam. He was framed! Too bad we are finding this out now, before he is executed. If we had executed him first, being so innocent, maybe he could have been elevated to sainthood.
18 posted on 03/16/2004 8:23:31 AM PST by hopespringseternal
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To: hopespringseternal
Do the ends justify the means in your opinion then?

19 posted on 03/16/2004 8:25:38 AM PST by JohnGalt (If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied. -- R. Kipling)
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To: JohnGalt
"Oh, and could you sign that blank check?"

Its war for crying out loud. A certain (small) percentage of the bombs are going to land on women, children, and old people. When is that ever OK?

Your "ideological purity" is far outweighed by real blood. If I make the judgement call taking into account real lives, your ideology doesn't mean squat.

So some Iraqis lied to get us to drop bombs in the vicinity of their relatives because they considered our bombs less of at threat than the madman they were meant for.

Let me try to be succinct: Unless you can demonstrate that 1) Saddam was not threat, 2) Saddam was not financing terrorists, 3) Saddam was not a complete butcher, I DON'T CARE.

There was an elephant in the room and you are concerned with the dust mites.

20 posted on 03/16/2004 8:53:37 AM PST by hopespringseternal
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