Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures (wild chicken chase)

[TacticalPeek]

Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures

Informers' accounts were not properly vetted and electronic data misread, officials say

By Bob Drogin, Times Staff Writer


WASHINGTON ? A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

snip

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt


more
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-intel17jun17,1,126799.story?coll=la-home-headlines

(http://bugmenot.com)

[JohnyCanuck]

1. A laugh riot - Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team

It's just too bad 10,000 Iraqis civilians got blown away in part because the intelligence analysts supposedly couldn't tell the difference between a chicken farm and a missile silo. I wonder what spy satellites were being used to take their pictures. Surely it couldn't have been the satellites that are alleged to have the ability to read a car license plate from 150 miles out in space.

[grytpype]

2. Wow. Read the whole article. Very damning.

This is incredible. Just when you think it can't get any weirder, it does.

[TacticalPeek]

3. It does:

Still unexplained is Britain's claim, cited by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Baghdad recently had sought to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. Some experts speculate that British intelligence misinterpreted or misrepresented Iraq's rejection of an unsolicited and perhaps bogus offer. U.S. officials said a document found in the basement of Iraq's intelligence headquarters, for example, showed Baghdad had received a similar offer for uranium, cobalt and other minerals from a Congolese businessman in Nairobi, Kenya. A note attached to the document shows that an Iraqi official declined the deal.

David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector, said Iraqi officials told him they received numerous such offers in the late 1990s.

"They said not a week goes by when they don't get an offer for nuclear weapons, uranium, red mercury, or something," he said. "Everything was sent back to Baghdad, where the general policy was to turn it down. It could be fundamentalists, it could be a scam, it could be an intelligence dangle. They didn't turn everything down. But their general reaction was, 'Forget it.' "

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Looks like the Iraqis could recognise conmen

much better than the US and UK could.

[ze_dscherman]

5. If the U.S. had intelligence on missiles

.. it would have been obliged by the UN resolutions on Iraq to report this to the UN weapons inspectors.

The U.S. administration, like cult members, wanted to believe.

[DoYouEverWonder]

6. But they might have had Weapons of Mass Distruction

So we had no choice. American lives were at stack. We couldn't wait for Saddam to give us the answer in the form of a mushroom cloud, now could we?

[UpInArms]

7. gives the terms

chickenshit and chickenhawks a whole new meaning.

[wellst0nev0ter]

9. LOL!

[TacticalPeek]

8. Kick. n/t

:kick: