U.S. Intelligence Misled by Sources of Prewar Iraq Information, Powell Says

from NTI: Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The CIA was “misled” by some of its sources on prewar intelligence on alleged Iraqi WMD efforts, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday. Meanwhile, the former head of the U.S. Central Command criticized the Bush administration’s use of intelligence provided by former Iraqi opposition groups, which have been heavily criticized for providing inaccurate information (see GSN, April 13). During an appearance yesterday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Powell briefly discussed the controversy surrounding an Iraqi defector known as “Curveball,” who reportedly was the source for a now-discredited claim Powell made in February 2003 to the U.N. Security Council that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons facilities (see GSN, March 29). While saying that his presentation was based on the “best information” made available by the CIA, Powell also reiterated that the sources for such information had been wrong, and went even further by saying they had misled U.S. intelligence. “It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading. And for that I am disappointed, and I regret it,” Powell said. According to reports, Curveball was first made available to Western intelligence agencies by the Iraqi National Congress, a former opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi that has been accused of providing bad intelligence on prewar Iraq. In a speech last week, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of the U.S. Central Command, said that one of the “biggest” mistakes of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq was its reliance on exile groups. In a May 12 speech before the Board of Directors of the Washington think-tank Center for Defense Information, Zinni outlined a 10-point critique of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq crisis. Among the administration’s mistakes, Zinni said, was trusting Iraqi exile groups such as the Iraqi National Congress, which he called “Gucci guerrillas from London.” “We bought into their intelligence reports,” Zinni said. “And we ended up with a group that fed us bad information,” he said. U.S. Senator Joseph Biden (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, yesterday criticized the Bush administration’s apparent continued use of the National Congress for gathering information. According to reports, the U.S. Defense Department is paying the group more than $300,000 per month for intelligence-gathering efforts (see GSN, March 11). “I think he [Chalabi] seems to be the darling of the vice president and of some of the civilians in the Defense Department. I think he’s a problem. He’s not part of the solution. But yet there seems to be an unwillingness to break from him,” Biden said during an appearance on Meet the Press.