Posted on 03/20/2006 6:13:32 PM PST by AZRepublican
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the period before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister Naji Sabri, was a secret paid source of the CIA, "NBC Nightly News" reported on Monday.
Citing unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials, NBC said Sabri provided details of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be more accurate than CIA estimates.
Intelligence sources said Sabri was paid more than $100,000 through an intermediary in a September 2002 deal brokered by the French, NBC reported.
Sabri may have thought he was working with the French, but some U.S. intelligence officials believe he knew it was the CIA, NBC said.
The CIA questioned Sabri through a go-between about Saddam's WMD program, the report said.
According to the intelligence sources, Sabri indicated that Saddam had no significant weapons program and that while the deposed Iraqi leader desperately wanted a nuclear bomb it would have taken more time for him to build one than the CIA's several-months-to-a-year estimate, NBC reported.
Both the CIA and Sabri said Saddam had stockpiled chemical weapons, but both were wrong, NBC said.
WMD were the main justification for President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq three years ago, but no such weapons have been found.
Citing intelligence sources, NBC said the CIA's brief relations with Sabri ended after he refused to defect to the United States. The agency had been hoping for a public relations coup, the network said.
Sabri was not named among the former senior Iraqi officials on the U.S. most-wanted list of 55 Iraqi fugitives.
NBC said it found Sabri teaching at a university in the Middle East, but was not revealing his location for security reasons.
Sabri declined to be interviewed or to comment as did the CIA, NBC said, adding that the agency also would not say why it did not listen to Sabri's warnings.
A CIA representative had no comment on the report.
Why the hell has this been released? Isn't this still classified?
Didn't you get the memo from the Democrats?
Nothing is classified anymore except Val Plame's desk duties at the CIA!
Ahh, yeah, I forgot!
Pardon me...
bump
"Not to mention how other current intel assets and people we try to recruit in the future will take this revelation--e.g. The US will not or cannot keep its secrets, so my life may be on the line."
Amazing effort by our media and people inside the intelligence community to damage US intelligence interests.
Why exactly is the CIA viewed as being adversarial to the WH? what is the political background there?
After 9-11, we declared war on three sponsors of global terrorism. After securing Afghanistan and bringing Pakistan on board, we took out the only real standing army in the area that might come to Iran's aid when the campaign against it begins.
Israel should rename a Holy City after Bush.
It sounds like utter BS. Why would the agency encourage a key source to defect. It makes no sense, either in an institutional sense nor in the selfish motivations of the CIA bureaucrats running this agent.
If the guy had defected, it would not have been the CIA that would get the credit.
Sickening. It's just like when 60 minutes gave the exact location of where a Danish cartoonist was in hiding in the US.
I think there are several things that are involved in the CIA hostility to the WH:
1.WH attempt to reform CIA after WMD debacle by appointing an outsider to head the Agency. Some heads have rolled and others have retired.
2.An entrenched group in the Agency who might be called 'the enervators.' They always find ways to fuzz up the intel with conflicting information so that nothing can be done but generate more reports.
3.A true lack of qualified Mid East experts and Humint personnel in the area was exposed by several identified intel errors including WMD which led to 1 above. So there are some who are threatened by this exposure.
4. There are some who feel that if the WH asks questions about intel that this creates pressure on the Agency to meet WH expectations--although investigations by Congress haven't turned up anyone who says they were directly pressured.
Good observations. I think they have a political motive also. They are outright lying about their assessments regarding Iraq.
The Intelligence they provided in the 90's lead to the following US policies and actions:
12 year deployment of roughly 28,000 troops, 30 naval vessels, 200 military aircraft and other equipment at a cost of $14.5 billion per year.
$150 million no bid contract to BioPort, to innoculate all personnel serving in the Gulf against Antrax attacks.
UN economic sanctions against Iraq which caused 200,000 to 600,000 Iraqi deaths.
The airstrikes the Al Shifa plant in Sudan against Iraqi WMD facilities during DESERT FOX..
Ultimately, the resumption of the War in Iraq, after Tenet claimed it was a "Slam Dunk"
Thats the legacy of the CIA WMD Analysts such as Val Plame.
Here is how they know it:
1. They read it a thousand times in the MSM.
2. The idea that the chemical weapons were shipped to Syria cannot be considered as a possibility becuase it would contradict what they've read a thousand times in the MSM.
There...it's fixed...
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