Reply #21: Article: America's Weapons Evidence Flawed, Say Spies

[Tinoire]

Published on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 in the Times/UK
America's Weapons Evidence Flawed, Say Spies
by Tim Reid in Washington


<snip>

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 program and links to al-Qaeda that they manipulated intelligence.

According to a report written by Seymour Hersh, the veteran New Yorker investigative reporter, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP) relied too heavily on suspect intelligence provided by Iraqi defectors with links to the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile.

<snip>

One former CIA official told Mr Hersh: “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they (OSP) were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fits their agenda. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with . . . as if they were on a mission from God. If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”

<snip>

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence agency, told Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times, that when experts wrote reports skeptical about the existence of weapons of mass destruction “they were encouraged to think it over again”.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0507-09.htm