Posted on 09/28/2003 7:29:44 PM PDT by Pokey78
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement.
In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.
The arrangement, paid for with taxpayer funds supplied to the exile group under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, involved extensive debriefing of at least half a dozen defectors by defense intelligence agents in European capitals and at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in late 2002 and early 2003, the officials said. But a review early this year by the defense agency concluded that no more than one-third of the information was potentially useful, and efforts to explore those leads since have generally failed to pan out, the officials said.
Mr. Chalabi has defended the arrangement, saying that his organization had helped just three defectors provide information to American intelligence about Iraq's suspected weapons program, and that two of them had been judged to be credible.
But several federal officials said the arrangement had wasted more than $1 million in taxpayers' money and had prompted them to question the credibility of Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, who have enjoyed powerful backing from civilian officials at the Pentagon and are playing a significant role in the provisional government in Baghdad.
Intelligence provided by the defectors that could not be substantiated included information about Iraq's suspected program for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as other information about the Iraqi government, the officials said. They said they would not speculate on whether the defectors had knowingly provided false information and, if so, what their motivation might have been. One Defense Department official said that some of the people were not who they said they were and that the money for the program could have been better spent.
Two other Defense Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, defended the arrangement. While the credibility of the Iraqi defectors debriefed under the program had been low, they said, it had been roughly on par with that of most human intelligence about Iraq. The officials also said the Defense Intelligence Agency had been generally skeptical of the defectors from the start, on the ground that they were motivated more by the money and the desire to stir up sentiment against Saddam Hussein than by a desire to provide accurate information.
A Defense Department official who defended the arrangement said that even most of the useful information provided by the defectors included "a lot of stuff that we already knew or thought we knew." But the official said that information had "improved our situational awareness" by "making us more confident about our assessments."
The Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions about the value of the intelligence provided as part of the arrangement are believed to have been included in a broader, classified report sent this month to Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, the officials said. That report focused on lessons learned by the intelligence community during the war in Iraq, they said.
The Iraqi National Congress had made some of these defectors available to several news organizations, including The New York Times, which reported their allegations about prisoners and the country's weapons program.
The Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella group, was formed with American help in 1992 and received millions of dollars under the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. In a stance that angered the dissidents and some Pentagon officials, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had long been skeptical of the information from defectors that Mr. Chalabi's organization had brought out of Iraq. Among that group of defectors was Khadhir Hamza, the most senior ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Mr. Hussein's nuclear program, who complained about the seeming lack of interest of American intelligence organizations in hearing what he had to say.
The partnership between the Iraqi exiles and the American government was initially run by the State Department, with millions of dollars provided to the Iraqi National Congress under the Iraq Liberation Act, whose declared purpose was to promote a transition to democracy in Iraq. One element was intended to collect information about Iraq in order to promote public awareness about the failings of Mr. Hussein's government.
Instead, State Department officials involved in the program said, the Iraqi exiles used most of the money to recruit defectors who claimed to have sensitive intelligence information. Until 2002, the State Department handed over those defectors to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for debriefing. Federal officials said that very few of them had been judged to be credible, but they said they knew of no specific assessment of their credibility.
After internal State Department reviews in 2001 and 2002 concluded that much of the $4 million allocated for the program had not been properly accounted for and that the intelligence-gathering program was not part of the department's mission, oversight was transferred to the Defense Department in 2002.
The Defense Intelligence Agency then took the lead in debriefing the defectors, Defense Department officials said. The officials said they believed that the review of the defectors' credibility overed only the period in which the defense agency had run the program.
I guess that means that the Iraqi National Congress' accuracy rating is about equivalent to that of the NY Times.
The article cites how much money was supposedly spent through the Iraq Liberation Act, but there's a problem with that.
The money was set aside in the Iraq Liberation Act, but that does not mean that much of it was actually spent. Not much made it to its destination, which is amazing given that Clinton was never shy about spending money on anything else. Last I heard, the funds were stalled, at least during the Clinton administration, except for some funding for Radio Free Europe, and some small expenditures when the administrtion was pressured.
Here's one source, though it's not the one I remember from back in the Clinton's time (I would prefer to find that earlier source since it explained more about what was going on politically):
Iraqi rebels to get special weapons By ELI J. LAKE
United Press International, 12 February 2001
In the next month, a handful of Iraqi rebels are scheduled to go to College Station, Texas, for their first round of weapons training from federal lawmen and members of the military's Special Forces under a U.S. plan to support insurgency activities inside Iraq.
The Iraqi National Congress, the coalition of Iraqi dissidents and rebels supported by the United States officially since 1998, are in the final stages of completing a $98,000 contract with the Guidry Group, a consulting firm comprised of ex-secret service agents. Under that contract, INC security officers will learn the fine art of diplomatic security.
What distinguishes this training from previous courses for the INC, is that the rebels attending the five-day seminar will also learn how to use pistols, Kalishnikov rifles, 12-gauge shotguns and a variety of other fire-arms. Previous U.S.-backed training for the INC has been limited to "non-lethal" activities, such as emergency medical care, public relations and war crimes investigations, according to an INC adviser.
While the State Department still considers this assistance to be of the non-lethal variety, the INC clearly does not. "This is important because this is the first time we are receiving lethal training with the United States government funding," said Francis Brooke, the Washington adviser for the INC.
Retired Gen. Wayne Downing, the commander of the joint special operations task force during the Gulf War, concurred. He told United Press International, "This is significant because this is the first lethal training. It is designed to protect, so the significance is that this is the first time they are being trained to do anything on this level."
But State Department officials disagree. One official said, "This is not lethal assistance. The skills involved are purely protective and defensive in nature of the type necessary for the Iraqi National Congress to protect any non lethal presence or activities inside Iraq."
The debate over lethal assistance marked the INC's fiercest battle with the Clinton Administration. The lethal aid promised in the 1998 legislation that authorizes $98 million for the group was never delivered largely under the premise that the INC was not ready to challenge Hussein militarily.
But this thinking may change under the Bush administration. While Secretary of State Colin Powell has carefully avoided making any comments on the military aspect of the Iraq Liberation Act, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld is a long time supporter of a plan to oust Hussein through U.S. backed rebels.
Both Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz signed a letter to President Clinton in 1998 that spurred the creation of the Iraq Liberation Act.
The Feb. 18, 1998 letter states, "Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based insurrection. We must exploit this opportunity." It goes on to outline a series of steps the government should take to aid the INC, including positioning "U.S. ground force equipment in the region so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq."
The $98,000 contract with the Guidry group is tucked into a larger $4 million aid package -- separate from the Iraq Liberation Act funding -- aimed at establishing an alternative Iraqi media through radio transmitters, satellite television stations and newspapers. The plan, approved initially in September by the Clinton administration, also sets aside money for INC members to go inside Iraq to collect information on war crimes, Iraq's military and political changes.
One of the INC's principal leaders, Ahmad Chalabi, speaking to reporters and analysts Friday at the American Enterprise Institute, said he believed his group could attract a number of defectors from Iraq's military if they established a presence inside the country.
"The Iraqi army is unwilling to defend Saddam, but they are too weak to overthrow him," Chalabi said, estimating that 40 percent of Iraq's elite Republican guard is absent without leave.
To be sure, the five-day security seminar is a far cry from the battle field training and American military support envisioned by Chalabi and his supporters in Washington.
Chalabi on Friday said he hoped the Pentagon would change the rules of engagement for American aircrafts patrolling the no-fly zone in northern and southern Iraq, to allow fighters to attack Iraqi army battalions when they were moving against civilian targets. Downing, who has worked as an adviser on a volunteer basis with the INC for three years, called the security training in the State Department aid package a "drop in the bucket." "This is not the training they will need to put together a liberation army. There you would need individual training, basic training, weapons training, involving anti tank weapons, machine guns, rockets and that sort of thing," he said.
Downing estimates this sort of training would take six to eight months and could be provided by either the U.S. military or the CIA. INC officials will meet with the acting assistant secretary for Near East affairs, Edward Walker, Tuesday to discuss the remaining details of the $4 million aid package.
The NY Times and all who are working to rewrite the reality of IRAQ under the living WMD Saddam Hussein have blood on their hands.
The war was absolutely just.
By the critics own calculations, 5000 children a month were dying under Hussein. We now know - based on doctors' testimonies, warehouses full of medicine, waylaid billions in bribes and personal $$$$ - Saddam intentionally starved children for exploitation on the world stage. ANSWER, Dem politicians and critics did his bidding - parroted Saddam's anti-American lies to the world, raising money and spreading hate, financing the international protests (that gave France and Germany the excuse to jump ship pre-war) with 30 pieces of Saddam's silver. Still waiting for THAT NY Times and Congressional investigation after 6 months.
Chalabi, by his actions, has already helped save 30,000 children. Add the millions of Iraqis who are now free and not targets of Ba'athist Socialist torture and murder, and the Israeli lives saved because suicide bombers are no longer being financed by Hussein.
Not a weapon of mass destruction? Condemn Chalabi? Please! How would any compassionate patriot get this Kofi/Clintonized world to listen? If he exaggerated the WMD threat to save thousands and remove Saddam, so be it. We know what Saddam did. What he wanted to do. Saddam will not terrorize this nation again.
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