- President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined
in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted
and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence,
government officials and analysts claimed yesterday.
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- Officials in the CIA, FBI and Department Of Energy are
being put under intense pressure to produce reports which back the administration's
line, the Guardian has learned. In response, some are complying, some are
resisting and some are choosing to remain silent.
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- "Basically, cooked information is working its way
into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it
in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent
Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence.
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- In his address, the president reassured Americans that
military action was not "imminent or unavoidable", but he made
the most detailed case to date for the use of force, should it become necessary.
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- But some of the key allegations against the Iraqi regime
were not supported by intelligence currently available to the administration.
Mr Bush repeated a claim already made by senior members of his administration
that Iraq has attempted to import hardened aluminium tubes "for gas
centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons".
The tubes were also mentioned by Tony Blair in his dossier of evidence
presented to parliament last month.
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- However, US government experts on nuclear weapons and
centrifuges have suggested that they were more likely to be used for making
conventional weapons.
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- "I would just say there is not much support for
that [nuclear] theory around here," said a department of energy specialist.
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- David Albright, a physicist and former UN weapons inspector
who was consulted on the purpose of the aluminium tubes, said it was far
from clear that the tubes were intended for a uranium centrifuge.
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- Mr Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and
International Security, a Washington thinktank, said: "There's a catfight
going on about this right now. On one side you have most of the experts
on gas centrifuges. On the other you have one guy sitting in the CIA."
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- Mr Albright said sceptics at the energy department's
Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in California had been ordered to
keep their doubts to themselves. He quoted a colleague at the laboratory
as saying: "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected
to remain silent."
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- There is already considerable scepticism among US intelligence
officials about Mr Bush's claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. In
his speech on Monday, Mr Bush referred to a "very senior al-Qaida
leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year".
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- An intelligence source said the man the president was
referring to was Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was arrested in Jordan in 2001
for his part in the "millennium plot" to bomb tourist sites there.
He was subsequently released and eventually made his way to Iraq in search
of treatment. However, intercepted telephone calls did not mention any
cooperation with the Iraqi government.
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- There is also profound scepticism among US intelligence
experts about the president's claim that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida
members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases".
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- Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who tracked al-Qaida's rise,
said that there were contacts between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqi government
in Sudan in the early 1990s and in 1998: "But there is no evidence
that a strategic partnership came out of it. I'm unaware of any evidence
of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the United States."
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- A source familiar with the September 11 investigation
said: "The FBI has been pounded on to make this link."
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- In making his case on Monday, Mr Bush made a startling
claim that the Iraqi regime was developing drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs), which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons
across broad areas".
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- "We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of
using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," he warned.
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- US military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting
eastern European trainer jets, known as L-29s, into drones, but said that
with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets
in the US.
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- "It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United
States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral
who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Centre
for Defence Information.
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- Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top
levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the
Pentagon.
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- "CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence
department in favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi
exiles," he said. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening
to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now."
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,807194,00.html
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