The NY Times, still reeling from its Blair/Bragg troubles of the spring, gingerly noted in a front page article this fact (which did not appear on the front page), which makes one think almost immediately of Judith Miller:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/international/middleeast/29DEFE.htmlMr. Chalabi has defended the arrangement, saying that his organization had helped just three defectors provide information to American intelligence about Iraq's suspected weapons program, and that two of them had been judged to be credible.
But several federal officials said the arrangement had wasted more than $1 million in taxpayers' money and had prompted them to question the credibility of Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. Both have enjoyed powerful backing from civilian officials at the Pentagon and are playing a significant role in the provisional government in Baghdad.
Intelligence provided by the defectors that could not be substantiated included information about Iraq's suspected program for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as other information about the Iraqi government, the officials said. They said they would not speculate on whether the defectors had knowingly provided false information and, if so, what their motivation might have been. One Defense Department official said that some of the people were not who they said they were and that the money for the program could have been better spent.
...
The Iraqi National Congress had made some of these defectors available to several news organizations,
including The New York Times, which reported their allegations about prisoners and the country's weapons program.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
