Invasion based on 'distortion, lies'

By RAYMOND WHITAKER in London

The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication.

A high-level British source said yesterday that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq.

"They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said.

Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."

Since the war started there have been finds of suspected chemical weapons but they have turned out to be false alarms. The latest find was reported yesterday.

United Nations inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 150km.

They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and US assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.

On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the Government of Niger in west Africa.

This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.

On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified.

The parts released were those which made it appear the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons was "very low" for the "foreseeable future".

On biological weapons, the United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories.

He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims - including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" - had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.

On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range.

No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the British Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, said Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were, in fact, Scuds.

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end - a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

US and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody.

Robin Cook, who as British Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.

One report released last autumn by British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Hoon said such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried.

A later Downing St "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic publications.

"You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing."

Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out Downing St's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would be endangered.

"That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the evidence."

Rangwala said much of the information on weapons of mass destruction had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering.

"The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed," he said.

"The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort."

Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British Governments are suggesting that so-called weapons of mass destruction were destroyed after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war.

This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence".

An Iraqi scientist said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.

Other explanations for the failure to find the weapons include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or are so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find.

But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for the weapons to other tasks.

One US official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".

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Herald Feature: Iraq