U.S. Suspects It Received False Iraq Arms Tips

L.A. Times ^ | 8-27-03 | Bob Drogin

[dogbyte12]

WASHINGTON — Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.

The goal, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We're reinterviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S."

[dogbyte12]

L.A. Times, so this is just an excerpt. The gist now though is that the government believes we were lied to a great deal about Iraq's weapons program. Some of the "defectors" who claimed specific knowledge of where weapons were at, were lying, either directly, being double agents of saddam, or lying about info for money, fame, green cards, and the like.

Some of the info we got was so specific, that we were sure we would find stuff that just wasn't there. We are going to retool, and figure out why we were given such bad info.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

How Orwellian.

Instead of a President having to say "I was wrong", nameless senior sources say "we were lied to".

[WaterDragon]

Saddam sent us phony defectors to make us believe he HAD WMDs? Or to give us false info about where the WMDs are hidden? The first makes no sense, you know. The second might. We know he did have them because he used them.

[alpowolf]

Don't forget, accountability is for the little people.

[Pikamax]

uh.. That would mean a whole lot of countries and their intelligence agencies were wrong for a long time now, that includes the United Nations.

[KevinDavis]

According to a unnamed official that is.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Bush: "OK, OK, so there were no WMD even though I told the American people I was sure there were. That doesn't make me a lying liar who tells lies."

[alpowolf]

I'm sure we'll never find out just who we're talking about. But I suspect that if "bogus defectors" really did mislead our govt, they were not necessarily agents of Saddam. Some of them could easily be Iraqis who figured they would profit in some way by the removal of Saddam.

Don't forget about the false stories planted before Gulf War I, about Iraqi soldiers yanking babies out of incubators in Kuwait.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"accountability is for the little people"

True, in this White House at any rate.

[af_vet_rr]

Some of the "defectors" who claimed specific knowledge of where weapons were at, were lying, either directly, being double agents of saddam, or lying about info for money, fame, green cards, and the like.

Please tell me that our intelligence about the WMD was not based on a bunch of defectors/informants. Please tell me that our intelligence agencies are not that incompetent.

This would be like me telling somebody "I'll give you $5 if you talk about "A", but I'll give you $5000 if you talk about "B"". Well of course they are going to talk about "B", they want the money, they'll tell me what I want to hear.

[dogbyte12]

From what I gather in the article and others, we now believe Saddam was going for a Just-In-Time(JIT) system. Bascially, he was still planning on using chemical weapons, but using stuff that was easy to make on the fly and keeping the components seperate, so there would be "no weapons".

If you have 5 chemicals you need to make something nasty in other words, he would store them seperately on opposite ends of Baghdad. By itself, each component wouldn't constitute a weapon. When the need arose, all he had to do was just take 4 trucks, move the chemicals to where the 5th one was, mix, and within days have a chemical weapon factory running on the fly.

We were lied to by defectors, but we wanted to be lied to. Perhaps some were double agents. Basically, they would come over, and say Chemical Weapons are in this spot, we would tell the UN to check there, and nothing would be found. Saddam probably guessed that we would take that to mean that there was no program, or to discredit us, but I am not sure.

I was always baffled before the lead-up to the war, why we didn't grab a secure phone line, figure out when inspectors would be a 5 minute drive from a place we knew weapons were, and drop the dime on it really quick before it could be moved. We really weren't sure where things were, because we were getting so much disinfo. It would be interesting to see how much info we passed on to the UN inspectors, and maybe that was part of the game. Saddam's fake defectors would give us bogus info, we passed to the UN, they found out the info was bogus, and it created disharmony between us and them.

[rightbanker]

You'll probably get banned or censored, certainly attacked by the Bush can do no wrong crowed here.

Who knows if this is true. But if it is, it's pretty sad. If it's true it means that the adminstration appparently wanted to believe so badly that Hussain was a threat, that they were willing dupes for Iraqi exiles who wanted Hussain ousted at any cost.

I think that's how con men mostly do it -- entice you into believing the falsehood that you will want to believe anyway.

I guess you can't call that lying, exactly, since the con man is just helping you to pull of a bit a self-deception that you are eager to pull of yourself anyway.

Anyway, I sure hope this isn't true. 'Cause if it is, it doesn't speak very well for the supposedly clear-eyed realists in the Bush adminstration.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"Don't forget about the false stories planted before Gulf War I, about Iraqi soldiers yanking babies out of incubators in Kuwait."

You mean that wasn't true? ;-)

Wasn't that part of the political strategy so President Bush Sr. could build support for the war?

Interesting ...

[alpowolf]

A lot of governments being wrong wouldn't be especially shocking. Bureaucrats have a way of thinking alike. The UN being wrong certainly wouldn't be news.

[af_vet_rr]

Bush: "OK, OK, so there were no WMD even though I told the American people I was sure there were. That doesn't make me a lying liar who tells lies."

You can't hold Bush responsible for this. He went with the info he had - heads should be rolling under him though. If we were to take responsibility for this, then many of us who are Conservative would applaud him for doing so, since many in government have a hard time accepting responsibility for their actions.

If he took responsibility for it though, he would not be re-elected in 2004 I believe. The liberals would turn it into "he lied to you about Iraq, what else will he lie about"

[ConsistentLibertarian]

" If it's true it means that the adminstration appparently wanted to believe so badly that Hussain was a threat, that they were willing dupes for Iraqi exiles who wanted Hussain ousted at any cost.

I think that's how con men mostly do it -- entice you into believing the falsehood that you will want to believe anyway.

I guess you can't call that lying, exactly, since the con man is just helping you to pull of a bit a self-deception that you are eager to pull of yourself anyway.

Anyway, I sure hope this isn't true. 'Cause if it is, it doesn't speak very well for the supposedly clear-eyed realists in the Bush adminstration."


Well said!

Now, think how the same ideological blindness could affect fiscal and monetary policy ...

Scary.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

"If he took responsibility for it though, he would not be re-elected in 2004 I believe."

So THAT's what we mean when we say "Character Counts"?

[alpowolf]

An old, tried and true, propaganda trick. I just finished a book on America in WW1 (Illusion of Victory) that detailed (among other things) how the British duped our govt with fake atrocity stories.

[rightbanker]

Haven't you ever played poker. Make the other guy believe you have four of a kind, when you really only have two pair, and he'll fold his full house. YOu win, with a losing hand.

Why wouldn't it make sense for Saddam to try to convince the US that he had usable WMD and that he was prepared to use them?

The only possible reason for his NOT doing so is if he believed that the US would not attack him if the US believed or knew that he did not possess WMD. But why would he believe that. I'm sure he could see that Bush and his adminstration were hell bent on bringing him down, even if he did not have WMD. His only chance of forestalling an attack, he may have calculated, would be to BLUFF a much more potent arsenal than he in fact had. We poker players do it all the time. (Of course, if your bluff is called, you often end up losing big. But folding and walking away really wasn't an option for Saddam, he probably calculated, since the US was going to come in almost regardless. )

[alpowolf]

So THAT's what we mean when we say "Character Counts"?

No, no, no. That rule only applies to blowjobs. ;)