Lies, mischief and the myth of Western intelligence services

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They were at it again last week, the liars of our Western "intelligence" community. John Bolton, the US
under-secretary of state for arms control and one of Donald Rumsfeld's cabal of pro-Israeli
neo-conservatives, was giving testimony before the decidedly pro-Israeli sponsors of the Syria
Accountability Act.

Mr Bolton, who once ludicrously claimed that Cuba had a biological weapons programme, accused Syria
of maintaining a stockpile of sarin and of working on VX and biological weapons. And Congressmen Eliot
Engel announced that "it wouldn't surprise me if those weapons of mass destruction that we cannot find
in Iraq wound up and are today in Syria". For Baghdad, read Damascus.

Some, indeed much, of this nonsense comes from the myth-making intelligence service of Israel, which
really does have weapons of mass destruction, although Engel's imaginative intervention probably had
its roots in the claim of a US intelligence officer in Baghdad last April. He went on insisting Iraq had
transferred its non-existent WMD to Syria by rail - before being shown a map that proved the only
railway line from Iraq to Syria passed through Turkey.

But why, oh why, do we go on accepting this trash? Why do we even listen to the so-called intelligence
services when they have so routinely - and bloodily - got it wrong? Among the last of the Hutton inquiry
confrontations was the debate over whether Iraqi chemical weapons were fitted to missiles - the famous
"45 minute" warning in Tony Blair's meretricious "dossier" - or were, as the snobbish John Scarlett
informed us, "battlefield" weapons. While it was perfectly clear that Mr Scarlett allowed Downing Street to
fiddle with the text so that it suggested the former, the reality is that both versions were totally untrue.
Not only did Iraq have no WMD - it didn't even have a battlefield version.


aljaazerah