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May. 18th, 2004 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheWhite House released claims of defector deemed unreliable by CIA
The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, 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 told Knight Ridder.
"The overall impression was that he was trying to pass information far beyond his area of expertise," said a senior U.S. official. 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 Iraqi 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 on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
The defectors and exile groups who provided false information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism also assured administration officials and advisers that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators, that the Iraqi military would surrender en masse and that former exiles could quickly help form a new Iraqi government and revive the country's oil industry.
While no evidence has surfaced to indicate that administration officials knowingly fed dubious information to Congress, the public and the media, Saeed's case suggests that officials either were unaware that he'd done poorly on the polygraph exam or overlooked that fact when they publicized his claims.
The administration also publicized claims about Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs from a defector whom the Defense Intelligence Agency had labeled a fabricator and charges that Saddam 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 used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable.
An administration official, speaking for the White House and insisting that his name and position not be used, said he couldn't comment on intelligence matters and referred all questions to the CIA.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official, who also asked not to be named, said he was unaware that the paper, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," "was vetted through the CIA" before it was released.
The White House paper gave prominent billing to Saeed's claims. It was released Sept. 12, 2002, in conjunction with a speech Bush delivered at the United Nations General Assembly.
The paper was the administration's first major compendium of "specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade."
It's still available on the White House and State Department Web sites.
The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, 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 told Knight Ridder.
"The overall impression was that he was trying to pass information far beyond his area of expertise," said a senior U.S. official. 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 Iraqi 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 on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
The defectors and exile groups who provided false information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism also assured administration officials and advisers that Iraqis would welcome American troops as liberators, that the Iraqi military would surrender en masse and that former exiles could quickly help form a new Iraqi government and revive the country's oil industry.
While no evidence has surfaced to indicate that administration officials knowingly fed dubious information to Congress, the public and the media, Saeed's case suggests that officials either were unaware that he'd done poorly on the polygraph exam or overlooked that fact when they publicized his claims.
The administration also publicized claims about Iraqi mobile biological weapons labs from a defector whom the Defense Intelligence Agency had labeled a fabricator and charges that Saddam 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 used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable.
An administration official, speaking for the White House and insisting that his name and position not be used, said he couldn't comment on intelligence matters and referred all questions to the CIA.
But a senior U.S. intelligence official, who also asked not to be named, said he was unaware that the paper, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," "was vetted through the CIA" before it was released.
The White House paper gave prominent billing to Saeed's claims. It was released Sept. 12, 2002, in conjunction with a speech Bush delivered at the United Nations General Assembly.
The paper was the administration's first major compendium of "specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade."
It's still available on the White House and State Department Web sites.