WASHINGTON, 3 February 2003 — Efforts of the White House to build a case for war against Iraq by linking it to the Al-Qaeda terror network have baffled the country’s state intelligence agencies, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Several analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have complained that the US administration had overblown scant evidence linking Iraq with Al-Qaeda, the paper quoted officials as saying.
Some CIA analysts have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for war, the report quoted officials as saying.
At the FBI, several investigators said they were “baffled” by the White House’s “insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden’s network,” the report, based on interviews with administration officials, said.
“We’ve been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don’t think it’s there,” the report quoted a government official as saying.
The report of friction within the intelligence agencies comes as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepares to go before the United Nations on Wednesday to offer new evidence that Iraq is not disarming.
The drive to link Iraq with the terrorist network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has driven a wedge between, on the one side, the Pentagon and the National Security Council and, on the other, the CIA and to some degree the State Department and agencies like the FBI, the report said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley were cited during interviews as being “most eager to interpret evidence deemed murky by intelligence officials to show a clearer picture of Iraq’s involvement in illicit weapons and terrorism”. (AFP)
