San Jose Mercury News - March 16, 2004
GLOBAL MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN WAS USED TO BUILD CASE FOR WAR By Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.
A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.
The Information Collection Program was financed out of the at least $18 million that the U.S. Congress approved for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, from 1999 to 2003. The group remains on the Pentagon's payroll.
The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.
Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.
In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, were not confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.
Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.
Other Iraqi groups made similar allegations about Iraq's links to terrorism and hidden weapons that also found their way into official administration statements and into news reports, including several by Knight Ridder.
Knight Ridder, which obtained a copy of the Iraqi National Congress letter, reviewed all the articles in what the document called a ``summary of ICP product cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (October 2001-May 2002).''
The Iraqi National Congress letter said it fed information to Arab and Western news media and to two officials in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the leading invasion advocates.
The articles made numerous assertions that so far have not been substantiated 11 months after Baghdad fell, including charges that:
* Saddam collaborated for years with bin Laden and was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials said there is no evidence of operational ties between Iraq and Al-Qaida, and no evidence of an Iraqi hand in the attacks.
* Iraq trained Islamists in the same hijacking techniques used in the Sept. 11 strikes and prepared them for operations against Iraq's neighbors and possibly the United States. Two senior U.S. officials said no evidence has been found to substantiate the charge.
* Iraq had mobile biological warfare facilities disguised as yogurt and milk trucks and hid banned weapons production and storage facilities beneath a hospital, fake lead-lined wells and Saddam's palaces. No such facilities or vehicles have been found.
* Iraq held 80 Kuwaitis captured in the 1991 Persian Gulf War in a secret underground prison in 2000. No Kuwaiti prisoners have been found.
* Iraq could launch toxin-armed Scud missiles at Israel that could kill 100,000 people and was aggressively developing nuclear weapons. No Iraq Scud missiles have been found.
* Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, missing since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, was seen alive in Baghdad in 1998. The case remains unresolved, but the Navy last week said there was no evidence that Speicher was ever held in captivity.
According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic Monthly, the Times of London, the Sunday Times of London, the Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight Ridder newspapers, the Kansas City Star and the Philadelphia Daily News. The Associated Press and others news services also wrote stories.
The Mercury News published three stories written by the New York Times based on Iraqi National Congress-provided materials.
Other U.S. and international news media picked up some of the articles. By mid-January 2002, polls showed that a solid majority of Americans favored military force to oust Saddam.
Many of the stories stated that the information in the stories could not be independently verified.
In at least one case, the Iraqi National Congress made a defector available to a journalist before his information had been fully reviewed by U.S. intelligence officials.
The defector, an engineer, Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, claimed in a Dec. 20, 2001, New York Times article by Judith Miller that there were biological, nuclear and chemical warfare facilities under private villas, the Saddam Hussein Hospital and fake water wells around Baghdad.
Senior U.S. officials said U.S. arms inspectors have found no fake wells or a lab under the hospital. Some secret rooms have been located under villas, mosques and palaces, but the officials, who asked not to be identified, said they were not among locations that Haideri claimed to know about.