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UN reports show allies' lack of intelligence

The UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, expressed his disappointment Friday at the quality of the intelligence given to him by the US and Britain before the war with Iraq.

Blix, who retires at the end of the month, told the BBC, "We went to a great many sites that were given to us by intelligence, and only in three cases did we find anything -- and they did not relate to weapons of mass destruction. That shook me a bit, I must say."

He added, "I thought `My God, if this is the best intelligence they had and we find nothing, what about the rest?'"

As he was speaking, the credibility of the White House claim that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world took a further blow when it emerged that the Pentagon's intelligence branch had doubts about Iraq's capabilities.

The report by the Pentagon defense intelligence agency said there was no reliable information that Iraq had battlefield-ready chemical and biological weapons.

It was produced in September just as US President George W. Bush was embarking on a campaign to convince the UN that Saddam Hussein and his arsenal were a threat to the international community and should be removed, by force if necessary.

It was leaked to US news organizations at the end of a week in which Bush, the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, have had to defend the decision to go to war by quashing suggestions that White House ideologues overrode intelligence officials to suit their political agenda.

A summary says, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has or will establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."

It adds that while Iraq appeared to have stocks of mustard gas the agency had detected no clear indications of other deadly agents.

A British government source, defending the intelligence services, said his recollection was that there had been frustration in London that Blix had not moved fast enough after being given the intelligence.

British intelligence claims credit for providing the information which led to the seizure of hundreds of documents at the home of an Iraqi scientist.

Blix led the hunt for biological and chemical weapons in Iraq and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), led the search for nuclear weapons.

The US and Britain have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction.

A team from the IAEA returned to Iraq Friday to check whether there has been any contamination from the postwar looting of Iraq's main nuclear site at Tuwaitha, south-east of Baghdad.

Its spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said, "We are going there to find out what's missing, to see if we can repackage and secure the material so that we can account for every gram of it."

The Verification, Research, Training and Information Centre in London says the inspectors were making good progress before they were withdrawn from Iraq on the eve of the war, but would have needed at least three more months to complete the job.

On the same day that Blix made his statement, UN weapons inspectors flatly contradicted claims by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that they were given information from "a number of sources" about Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Africa for nuclear weapons.

Officials at the Vienna-based international atomic energy authority insisted that, contrary to the British prime minister's statement to members of parliament (MPs) this week, the only intelligence about attempts to buy uranium from Niger came from documents that were found to be forgeries.

Only some time after the forgeries were revealed on March 7 by the IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei did the inspectors receive further ill-defined information.

"We've now been told vaguely there is something else," one official said. "But at the time, the forged documents were the only intelligence we had."

For example, the claim about Iraq trying to buy uranium oxide from Niger first emerged in the British government's document about Iraqi weapons procurement on September 24 last year.

Even before IAEA officials realized that the documents were forgeries, they had serious doubts about the authenticity of the claim because of the nature of Niger's uranium extraction industry.

The IAEA quickly realized that the documents handed over by the US were fake. The most glaring mistake was one letter purportedly signed by a Nigerian minister who had been out of office for 10 years.
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