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~NMENT

I EXHIBIT I
		14011
	Editorial Desk May 6,2003, Tuesday	Cr. 394ID
Missing In Action: Truth

By NICHOLAS D. KRJSTOF (NYT) 777 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A ,Page 31 , Column 1

Lets fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of
mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin,
29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud
missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-
range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al
Qeeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might
have, and I dont want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for
the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of
Saddam Hussein and head of Iraqs biological weapons program until his defection in
1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as
evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually
emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990s. Glen
Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamels debriefing was leaked
because insiders resented the waypoliticians were misleading the public. Copyright
New York Times Company May 6, 2003 Full Text:
Captioned as: E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com

When 1 raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of
reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons
of mass destruction, because weve liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant.

But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as An Fleischer said
on April 10 about W.M.D.: That is what this war was about.

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S.
government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and
concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.

Lets fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of
mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin,
29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud
missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-
range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al
Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might
have, and I dont want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for
the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Cohn Powell that Iraq tried to
buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in

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The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so
amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

im told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice
presidents office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S.
ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone
present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the
information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of
the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the
Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been
impossible. The envoys debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration
and seemed to be accepted  except that President Bush and the State Department
kept citing it anyway.

Its disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled
because they knew about this for a year, one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of
Saddam Hussein and head of Iraqs biological weapons program until his defection in
I 995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as
evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually
emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990s. Glen
Rangwala, a British iraq expert, saysthe transcript of Mr. Kamels debriefing was leaked
because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastem affairs in the Defense Intelligence
Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts
wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraqs W.M.D., they were encouraged to think it
over again.

In this administration, the pressure to get product right is coming out of O.S.D. [the
Office of the Secretary of Defense], Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts
had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the
Shilte clergy couta oe a problem. The guys who 1ri~d to L~Il th~1,1 that ~ b
understand that this advice was not welcome, he said.

The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or
manipulated1 Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even
more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: Intelligence was manipulated.

The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era,
manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up
support for Ronald Reagans policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of
Spookdom.

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