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White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat' (Julian Borger, The Guardian, October 9, 2002) President Bush's case against Saddam Hussein, outlined in a televised address to the nation on Monday night, relied on a slanted and sometimes entirely false reading of the available US intelligence, government officials and analysts claimed yesterday. . . . Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," said Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-intelligence. . . . "I would just say there is not much support for that [nuclear] theory around here," said a department of energy specialist. . . . Mr Albright said sceptics at the energy department's Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in California had been ordered to keep their doubts to themselves. He quoted a colleague at the laboratory as saying: "The administration can say what it wants and we are expected to remain silent." . . . There is already considerable scepticism among US intelligence officials about Mr Bush's claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. . . . There is also profound scepticism among US intelligence experts about the president's claim that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases". . . . Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon. . . . "CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence department in favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles," he said. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now."
posted by LoZo 3:58 PM
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