Edmund Storms referenced:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/oneworld/6573892701088790524
To summarize, this article claims that the gas attack in Iraq that many experts blamed on Saddam Hussein was actually carried out by Iran. This information was published in the New York Times on January 31, 2003. This is a good example of critical intelligence hidden in plain sight. Storms suspects that the blame was placed on Hussein by high officials in the US government, who were lying. I doubt it. History is full of incidents in which high officials made idiotic mistakes and overlooked intelligence (and commonsense knowledge) that, in retrospect, were obvious and out in the open. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs fiasco are good examples.
There were other technical intelligence failures during the build up to the war in Iraq, that were very similar to this. Before the war, long aluminum tubes were discovered in Iraq. Many administration officials claimed they were intended to be used in centrifuges used to process uranium (or plutonium -- I am not sure). Photographs of the tubes were shown to a retired centrifuge expert from Los Alamos. He looked at them for a moment and concluded that it was utterly impossible to use such tubes in a centrifuge. He was interviewed on NPR. He said something like, "I challenge anyone to show me the physics that would make that tube work. It's preposterous." He said the shape, the metal finish, and much else was wrong, and for that matter no one has tried to use aluminum since the early 1950s. The interviewer said perhaps the Iraqis are using obsolete technology. He said that would be absurd because much more recent designs have been placed in the public domain and are available on the Internet. Other experts point out that these aluminum tubes were exactly -- to the nearest micrometer -- like the ones in Iraq purchased from France for use in antiaircraft missiles. And indeed a large stock of tubes and missiles were discovered after the invasion.
Iraq's alleged mobile chemical trucks were probably hydrogen generators, which is what the Iraqis claimed. A biologist said that if he could see photos of the inside of the trucks, showing whether or not there was a precision climate control thermostat, he would know in an instant whether the trucks were intended for bioweapons. I never heard the end of that story. It has not been revealed whether there were thermostats, but I suppose if there had been the administration would have put the news on the front pages.
This reminds me a little of the closing scenes in the movie "Dr. Strangelove" where the Russian ambassador says to the American general, "our source of information [about your secret weapon] was the New York Times."
This is not really a joke. My parents were both involved in intelligence during World War II and the early stages of the Cold War, since there were posted to the US Embassy in the Soviet Union. My mother said the New York Times often published better intelligence than the State Department or the CIA. I think the main reason is that hundreds of experts read the New York Times, and when the Times makes a mistake they write letters pointing out the mistake. A much smaller circle of experts peer review information within the CIA. Nowadays the CIA does publish a great deal of information on the Internet and elsewhere, but during the Cold War it did not. In 1991 it published (or leaked) a 172 report on Japan that was so bad, with so many ridiculous mistakes that if a college freshman had written it I would have given him a failing grade. The report claimed that the Sino-Japanese war occurred in 1905, Hitler rose to power in 1939, and the Japanese Ministry of Education censors "all history books." (The correct answers are 1894-95, 1933, and the Ministry reviews grade-school textbooks.) The author also claimed that the Japanese katakana syllabary is "a form of Japanese writing using the english (sic) alphabet."
- Jed
