The Mounting Evidence

"Did They Lie?: the Debate over Iraq War Intelligence"
Niko Kyriakou, OneWorld US (Sat Nov 19)

"[According to Jeffrey M. Bale, a senior researcher at the non-partisan, Center for Nonproliferation Studies,] "Intelligence was tweaked in the sense that the people in the Bush team were convinced of certain things and basically, every bit of information that supported what they already believed they accepted, and ignored all the evidence that suggested their views were wrong." The question of culpability--whether officials unintentionally deluded themselves about Iraq's terror links and nuclear programs, or whether they actually knew that their claims were false--is probably unanswerable."I think they honestly believed it," Bale said. Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi scientist who worked on the Iraq nuclear weapons program beginning in 1981 and who left Iraq in the late 1990s, is less forgiving. "The intelligence was definitely concocted. I was in the nuclear Iraq program for 30 years and I left in '98. It was never resurrected since'91." Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, and the Office of Special Plans under them--they cherry-picked only the bad information," Khadduri told OneWorld. Prior to the war, Khadduri said he tried frantically to alert officials that Iraq's WMD programs were inactive and spoke extensively to the media, but he said no government agents ever contacted him. "In January 2003 I predicted that 'rivers of blood will flow.' I know my people," Khadduri said. The president and his aides have distanced themselves from the blame for faulty intelligence saying that Congress and the administration had access to the same intelligence."