ET TU, GUARDIAN?:

Spy in the sky good enough for most experts on the ground (Stuart Millar, February 6, 2003, The Guardian)

If this was to be Colin Powell's coup de grace, the aces in his hand were undoubtedly the series of high-resolution satellite images which he said graphically illustrated Iraq's attempts to conceal banned weapons from UN inspection teams and Saddam Hussein's ongoing weapons of mass destruction programme.

Last night, satellite imaging and chemical weapons experts agreed that while the images might not have been as conclusive as the photographs that proved the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1963, they offered compelling evidence of Iraq's failure to cooperate with the UN. [...]

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said the images offered compelling evidence that the Iraqis had concealed chemical weapons.

"I'm certain that his account is accurate. There is an art to the interpretation of satellite imagery that requires a certain amount of experience and also access to a massive database of relevant images," he said.

"You don't normally see a vehicle from a view of 100 miles above so the analysts cross-refer the image with other images and other intelligence to
identify what they are looking at. The release of these images will give others the ability to validate his assertions or if they were false, to expose them."

Tim Brown, a senior associate at the Washington-based thinktank, globalsecurity.org, said the images used by the Pentagon and CIA analysts would almost certainly have been much clearer than those revealed by Mr Powell.

"For security reasons, they would not have shown the full resolution images because they don't want to give away their capability. So they would have made them look much fuzzier and that may be why it was so difficult for the untrained eye to identify objects."

Only one specialist approached by the Guardian was unconvinced. Mark Monmonier, an expert in space imaging at Syracuse University, said: "The Bush administration either has little, or is playing its cards very close to the vest. Of course, what they're apparently looking for is not easily revealed on high-resolution space imagery. So much depends on intelligent inference, but inference none the less."

Considering the Guardian's hostility to the case for war, that's admirably honest reporting. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2003 3:56 PM