-Caveat Lector-
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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-No new evidence on Iraq
www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
since 1998 UN inspections
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TIMES of INDIA, JULY 21, 2003![]()
NEW YORK: American intelligence officials and senior members of the administration now acknowledge that there was little new evidence flowing into US agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq in 1998, creating an intelligence vacuum.
"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your GPS guidance," a Pentagon official said, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other," the official told the New York Times.
The officials' remarks come as the United States failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Prior to war, senior American officials had been insisting they had compelling evidence about Iraq's prohibited weapons programmes and belittled the inspectors for what they called failure to find the weapons despite intrusive searches.
"Even as they were conducting the most intrusive system of arms control in history, the inspectors missed a great deal," Vice President Dick Cheney had said last August, before the inspections resumed.
In a series of recent interviews with the Times, intelligence and other officials described the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House as essentially blinded after the UN inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998. They were left grasping for whatever slivers they could obtain, like unconfirmed reports of attempts to buy uranium, or fragmentary reports about movements of suspected terrorists.
Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired CIA officials that reviewed pre-war intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the CIA and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least.
Intelligence analysts drew heavily "on a base of hard evidence growing out of the lead-up to the first war, the first war itself and then the inspections process". "We had a rich base of information," he said, and, after the inspectors left, "we drew on that earlier base."
"There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with WMD were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Kerr said.
Even so, the Times says, just days before President Bush's State of the Union address in January, Paul D Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date.
"It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites ....but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing."
CIA director George Tenet expressed confidence in much of the intelligence about Iraq, saying it "comes to us from credible and reliable sources."
The paper said it was Cheney who, last September, was clearest about the fact that the US had only incomplete information. But he said that should not deter the country from taking action.
But the Times says within the White House, the shortage of fresh evidence touched off a struggle explaining the confusion about how the administration assembled its case.
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