Originally posted by spgoode:
Here's some reading on those defectors to bring you up to date. They call themselves the Iraqi National Congress. In the future maybe you should gather information before you make your case. It can be embarassing if you don't.

"key intelligence on weapons of mass destruction provided by Chalabiā??s group was false, perhaps even fabricated."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4855109/


"The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior CIA official and counterterrorism expert. "Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches."
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Iraqi_National_Congress



You certainly are good at making naieve ASSumptions, I'll give you that. I'm not talking about INC, I'm talking about a number of other Iraqi's that came forward early on and other sources that the CIA didn't go through the INC to get. Some information was even gleaned through Kurdish contacts. The most important of these contacts that the US gained was Hussein Kamal:

http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&expire=&urlID=4894507&fb=Y&partnerID=1660

More on Kamal (God do I hate using the Washington Post as support):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23545-2002Jul30?language=printer

"Iraq's known bioweapons labs were so carefully hidden that U.N. officials failed to discover them until 1995 -- four years after the start of inspections. Only after the defection of the program's chief, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, did inspectors find secret laboratories that were producing lethal bacteria by the ton.

Iraq eventually acknowledged making three types of biological weapons using anthrax bacteria and two kinds of biological toxins: botulinum toxin and aflatoxin. But Iraq is also known to have conducted extensive research on at least three other pathogens that attack humans or crops, and it dabbled with a half-dozen others, U.N. inspection reports show.

In its final three years in Iraq, the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, destroyed all of Iraq's known biological munitions, and much of the equipment needed to make new ones. But the inspectors didn't get it all.

"UNSCOM didn't destroy everything," said Richard Spertzel, a retired biological warfare expert who oversaw the dismantling of Iraq's bioweapons program. "Iraq still has enough equipment, material, people and know-how to make biological weapons."

Spertzel said he observed industrial fermenters, spray dryers and other equipment that could be used to mass-produce viruses and bacteria -- equipment that UNSCOM could not legally destroy because it had no proof the machines were being used to make weapons. He concludes that Iraq can now produce biological weapons without help from abroad, which it could not have done a decade ago."

But of course, all this gets forgotten and minimalized...



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