1. Iraqi exile group fed false information to news media
By Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells
Knight RidderNewspapers March 15, 2004
WASHINGTON— The formerIraqi exile group that gave the Bush
administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also
fed much of the same information to leading 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 INC's InformationCollection Program, a
U.S.-funded effortto collectintelligence in Iraq.
The assertions in the articles reinforced PresidentBush's claims that
Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with
Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding
biologicaland chemical weapons.
Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected
administration officials and members of Congress,helped fosteran
impressionthat 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,weren't 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.

2. Knight Ridder, which obtained a copy of the INC letter, reviewed all of
the articles in what the documentcalled a "summary of ICP product
cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (October
2001-May 2002)."
The articles made numerous assertions that so far haven't been
substantiated 11 months after Baghdad fell, including charges that:
_Saddam collaborated for years with bin Laden and was complicitin
the Sept. 11, 2001,terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials said there is
no evidence of operational ties betweenIraq and al-Qaida, and no
evidence of an Iraqi hand in the attacks.
_Iraq trained Islamic extremists in the same hijacking techniques
used in the Sept.11 strikes and prepared them for operations against
Iraq's neighbors and possiblythe United States. Two senior U.S.
officials said that so far no evidence has been found to substantiate
the charge.
_Iraq had mobile biologicalwarfare 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 so far.
_Iraq held 80 Kuwaitis captured in the 1991 Gulf War in a secret
underground prison in 2000.No Kuwaiti prisoners have been found
so far.
_Iraq could launch toxin-armed Scud missiles at Israel that could kill
100,000 people and was aggressivelydeveloping nuclear weapons.
No Iraq Scud missiles have been found yet.
_Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael ScottSpeicher, missing since the 1991 Gulf
war, was seen alive in Baghdad in 1998.The case remains
unresolved, but the Navy last week said there was no evidence that
Speicherwas ever held in captivity.
According to the letter, publications in which the articles appeared
included The New York Times,The Washington Post,Vanity Fair,

3. The Atlantic Monthly, The Times of London,The Sunday Times of
London, The Sunday Age of Melbourne, Australia, and two Knight
Riddernewspapers,The Kansas City Star and The Philadelphia Daily
News. The Associated Press and others also wrote stories based on
INC-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 noted that the information they contained couldn't
be independentlyverified.
In at least one case,the INC made a defectoravailable 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 laboratory under the hospital. Some secretrooms have
been located under villas, mosques and palaces, but the officials,
who asked not to be identified,said they weren't among locations that
al Haideri claimed to know about.
Several requests to The New York Times to speak to Miller were not
answered.
INC leader Ahmad Chalabi and other officials have insisted that the
group screened all defectors as thoroughly as they could.
U.S. intelligence officials have determined that virtually all of the
defectors' informationwas marginal or useless,and that some of the
defectors were fabricators or embellished the threat from Saddam.
Many of the articles relied on interviews with the same defectors,who
appeared to change facts with each telling. For instance, one defector

4. first appeared in several stories as an Iraqi army formercaptain, but a
later story said he was a major.
Another defectortold one interviewer that the aircraft fuselage on
which Islamic extremists received training in hijacking belonged to a
Boeing 707 and was quoted in a later story as saying that it came
from a Russian-made Tupolev.
Intelligence debriefers lookfor such differences whentrying to
determine the reliability of defectors,who sometimesexaggerate their
importance or try to tell interviewers what they think the interviewers
want to hear.
The Information CollectionProgram (ICP) was financed out of the
more than $18 million that Congress approved forthe Iraqi National
Congress,led by Chalabi, now a memberof the Iraqi Governing
Council, between1999 and 2003.The group remains on the
Pentagon's payroll.
The INC letter said that it fed ICP information to Arab and Western
news media and to two officials in the offices of Vice PresidentDick
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,the leading
invasion advocates.
The information bypassed U.S. intelligence channels and reached the
recipients even after CIA, Defense IntelligenceAgencyand FBI
officersquestioned the accuracy of the materials or the motives of
those who supplied them.
Some of the information, such as the charge that Iraq ran a terrorist
training camp in Salman Pak, found its way into administration
statements, including a Sept. 12, 2002,White House paper.
The CIA and the State Department had long viewed the INC as
unreliable.

5. Some articles cited in the INC letter were based on transcripts the
INC provided.An article in The Kansas City Star, for example, quoted
an unidentified INC memberas saying he had information that
Speicherwas seen alive in Baghdad in 1998.
A March 17, 2002,Sunday Times of London article on Saddam's
alleged illicit weapons was based on a 3,000-page transcriptof the
preliminary INC debriefing of al Haideri.
The article also reported claims in a videotaped interview made by
unnamed Iraqi oppositionofficials with a second defectorthat
Saddam had mobile biologicalwarfare laboratories disguised as milk
and yogurt trucks. Such vehicles have yet to be found.
Marie Colvin, a co-author of the article, said the INC insisted to her
that all defectors were scrutinized as fully as possiblebeforebeing
passed on, and that it was up to reporters to decide how to use their
information.
"I believe they acted in good faith," she said. "Over seven years, I
would not say there was a story I was fooled on."
Many articles quoted defectors as saying that Saddam was training
extremists from throughout the Muslim world at Salman Pak, outside
Baghdad.
"We certainly have found nothing to substantiate that," said a senior
U.S. official.
Instead, he said, U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Iraqi
counterterrorism units practiced anti-hijacking techniques on an
aircraft fuselage at the site.
An Oct. 12, 2001,WashingtonPost opinion piece by columnist Jim
Hoagland quoted an INC-supplied defector,Sabah Khalifa Khodada
Alami, as saying that Salman Pak offered hijacking and assassination
courses.

6. The article, which urged the Bush administration to examine possible
Iraqi complicityin Sept. 11, said Alami was a formermilitary instructor
and ex-army captain whom the INC tracked down to Fort Worth,
Texas, where he settled in May 2001 as a refugee.
Hoagland's column said the defectorshould not be automatically
believed.Hoagland said he wrote it to call attention to "the difficulties
that two defectors had in receiving an evaluation from the CIA."
In a Nov. 11 story in the Observerof London by David Rose,Alami
was quoted as saying that "the method used on 11 September
perfectlycoincides with the training I saw at the camp."
The article said Alami was assigned to Salman Pak between 1994
and 1995.
However, a Nov. 8, 2001,New York Times article said Alami worked
at Salman Pak for eight years.
The Oct. 12, 2001,Washington Postpiece also cited an INC claim
that an unnamed former Iraqi intelligence officerclaimed that
"Islamists" were trained at Salman Pak on a U.S.-made Boeing 707.
In a later article, which appeared to be based on an interview with the
same man, the aircraft was identified as an old Russian-made
Tupolev.
That defectorcomplained in The Washington Postcolumn that CIA
interrogators in Ankara had treated him "dismissively" earlier that
week.
The Nov. 8, 2001,New York Times article featured an interview in an
unidentified Middle East country that was arranged by the INC with
an unidentified Iraqi lieutenant general who said he'd been
interviewed by the CIA in Ankara the previous month.
He and an unidentified Iraqi intelligence service sergeantclaimed
they worked at Salman Pak for several years and that trainees were
being prepared for attacks on neighboring countries and possiblythe
United States.

7. The unnamed lieutenant general appears to have been the defector
of the same rank, code-named Abu Zeinab, who was featured in the
Nov. 11, 2001,Observerarticle.
The newspaper said the defectorwas interviewed by telephone, and
that it was also given details of an interview that two London-based
INC activists had conducted with Abu Zeinab at a safe house in
Ankara, Turkey.
Abu Zeinab claimed that trainees were instructed in hijacking aircraft.
The defector's full name, Abu Zeinab al Qurairy, was revealed in a
February 2002 article in Vanity Fair magazine that was also written by
Rose,who declined to comment.
The defectorsaid the Islamists at Salman Pak pledged to obeyorders
to carry out suicide attacks and that those who flunked training were
"used as targets in live-ammunition exercises."
Al Qurairy said in one exercise,students had to land helicopters on a
speeding train and then hijack it.
A list of the 108 articles that the Iraqi National Congress says were
based on information it supplied to news media is available on the
web at www.krwashington.com.
———
(c) 2004,Knight Ridder/Tribune InformationServices.
Iraq
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