Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count website estimating 2,500 innocent civilians put to death by US/UK forces -- a figure which seems a bit low given recent news reports.
CK
* * *
> From The New Yorker 5/12/03
SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal-a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030512fa_fact
* * * A piece in the London Times, about the NYT and New Yorker stories:
May 07, 2003
America's weapons evidence flawed, say spies
--
> From Tim Reid in Washington
THE continuing failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has triggered a blame game in America's intelligence agencies that erupted into public view yesterday.
As the hunt continues for Iraq's alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons - the main justification cited by President Bush for the war - carefully placed leaks revealed deep misgivings inside the CIA over intelligence used by the White House to make its case against Saddam.
Present and former CIA officials, quoted in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, claimed that a small number of powerful neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon were so determined to prove the existence of a banned weapons programme and links to al-Qaeda that they manipulated intelligence.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-671612,00.html
Chris Kromm Free Iraq! www.unitedforpeace.org