July 12, 2004
CLINTON LIED, PEOPLE DIED?:
Intelligence staff 'pressured to lie over Iraq attack' (Andrew Sparrow, 12/07/2004, Daily Telegraph)
A former senior defence official produced fresh allegations yesterday about Government attempts to twist intelligence on Iraq for political purposes.
Flights & HotelsJohn Morrison said intelligence officials came under pressure to declare the Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq a success in December 1998.
Mr Morrison, who was deputy chief of defence intelligence at the time, made his comments on BBC1's Panorama programme last night, three days before the publication of the Butler report into the use of intelligence before the 2003 invasion.
The report is widely expected to criticise the intelligence services and ministers for overstating the threat posed by Iraq's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Mr Morrison's disclosures suggest this was not the first time ministers had tried to twist intelligence.
The three-day bombing campaign in 1998 was supposed to damage Saddam Hussein's military infrastructure and, after it was over, defence intelligence officials were asked to support a statement saying it had been a success.
But, according to Mr Morrison, the Defence Intelligence Staff concluded that the strike "hadn't done much harm at all".
Mr Morrison told the programme: "We were being pressured to say that something had been effective when, in the long run, we decided it hadn't been particularly effective. That had never happened in my career before.
"I actually sent a note round to all the analysts involved congratulating them on standing firm in the face, in some cases, of individual pressure to say things that they knew weren't true."
You have to wonder if Saddam even invaded Kuwait or Iran, as little threat as he ever posed? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2004 3:10 PM
Wait a second--isn't this the bombing campaign that the media has been telling us was so effective that it destroyed Saddam's WMD capability, so we never should have invaded?
Posted by: brian at July 12, 2004 6:18 PMBy the time his trial starts, many on the left will be saying Saddam is Betty Crocker (and he made the trains run on time).
Posted by: jim hamlen at July 12, 2004 7:40 PMHere's the ironic thing -- go back to 1998 and see how many of the people now attacking Bush for his war against Saddam were swearing on a stack of Bibles that there was absolutely no "Wag the Dog" connection to Clinton's attacks on Saddam that year, or in the U.S. bombings of Osama's camp and the Sudanese aspirin factory. And those on the right who made the claim were quickly dismssed by the press as "Clinton haters" who simply wanted to impeach the president.
Yes, there was some truth to that, but only Bill and his advisors know how much truth there actually was to the "WTD" accusation, since all the flare-ups in 1998 seemed to coincide with key points of the Clinton scandal. If it turns out the critics were right in any way, than the left's ability to portray Bush as standing alone on his claims of Saddam being a clear threat were severely undercut by Preisdent Clinton making the same claims in part to move the spotlight away from the Lewisnky scandal.
If that's true, than Monica's service to her country really amounts to more than just servicing its leader.
Posted by: John at July 12, 2004 10:43 PMBrian,
Alternatively-to-apparently (given no WMD found since the invasion), the Defence Intelligence staffers were wrong and the strikes did do what they were supposed to do -- to the extent there were any Iraqi WMD/WMD programs left to begin with in 1998.
(Democrat, Saddam>Betty Crocker, Iraq war supporter going in, given what I thought was true at the time -- including baseline operational competence and honorable behavior by the Pentagon and the CPA; extremely disenchanted with Bush/Rumsfeld since then, keyword: Abu Ghraib.)
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