Don't swallow bait of U.S. intelligence

Ronan Bennett and Alice Perman, Guardian News Service, London

Colin Powell certainly raised questions for the Iraqis to answer at the United Nations on Wednesday. But before anyone gets carried away there are equally important questions to ask of U.S. intelligence.

We know from experience that politicians about to go to war are not above manipulating information to heat up public opinion. They have manufactured international incidents -- the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin "clash", for example, which President Lyndon Johnson used to deceive the Senate into giving him a declaration of war against North Vietnam. They can be the simple peddling of "evil Hun" stories, as with the discredited accounts of Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators. History has revealed the truth about such episodes, but too late.

On the few occasions we are allowed sufficient facts to form an independent assessment, the intelligence on offer is rarely persuasive. We were told, for example, of FBI intelligence linking Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian-born pilot living in Britain, to the Sept. 11 hijackers. Raissi was arrested in September 2001 and sent to Belmarsh to wait extradition proceedings.

To support its case, the FBI claimed to have video evidence of Raissi with Hani Hanjour (who flew into the Pentagon) flying together in America. Incontrovertible evidence, except that defense lawyers demonstrated the "video" to be a webcam picture of Raissi and his cousin taken in Colnbrook. Raissi spent five months as a maximum security prisoner before being released.

Raissi's case is untypical in that intelligence is rarely tested in open court. However, thanks to British and U.S. journalists we now have a clearer picture of the U.S. bombing on Aug. 20 1998 of the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory near Khartoum. At the time, the U.S. and Britain linked al Shifa to the manufacture of nerve gas. Subsequent revelations have shown it to be nothing of the sort.

Al Shifa was attacked in retaliation for the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam on Aug. 7, in which there were hundreds of casualties. The day after the attacks, the president's advisers ordered the Pentagon and CIA to draw up a list of sites connected to Osama bin Laden.

Twenty targets in Afghanistan, Sudan and a third, undisclosed, country were selected. Al Shifa was included because a soil sample covertly gathered the previous December was said to reveal traces of Empta (a chemical used in the manufacture of VX nerve gas).

However, CIA analysts wanted more testing. But in the rush to strike back, the analysts' doubts were pushed aside. On Aug. 19, when the final recommendations were made for Clinton, al Shifa was still on the hitlist, along with a second target in Sudan and al-Qaeda training camps near Khost in Afghanistan.

However, misgivings persisted about both Sudanese targets within the CIA, the State Department and the National Security Council. Doubts were also raised at the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where officials wrote a report for secretary of state Madeleine Albright questioning the link between al Shifa and Bin Laden.

The internal disquiet did save one target from destruction -- the second Sudanese site, a tannery alleged to have been owned by Bin Laden. It was removed from the list at 2 a.m. on Aug. 20, but could not alter al Shifa's fate. Later that day 13 cruise missiles struck the plant, reducing it to rubble and killing a nightwatchman. Clinton justified the attacks "because of the threat they present to our national security", and in Britain Tony Blair "strongly supported" the action.

However, Sudan, backed by scientists, diplomats and engineers, maintained that the plant made anti-malarial and anti-TB drugs, aspirin and veterinary medicine and had no connection with chemical weapons.

Further doubts began to emerge from unexpected sources: Jack Downing, head of the CIA's directorate of operations, believed the attack was unjustified. Analysts from the State Department were skeptical, as were the heads of the CIA's Africa division and counterterrorism center. Significantly, when the plant's owner, Saleh Idris, a Saudi businessman, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. seeking release of his assets in U.S. banks, frozen after the attack, the Treasury caved in.

In the face of the evidence it might have been expected that the British and U.S. governments' line would change. It did not, even though privately the attack is now accepted to have been unjustified. To admit that intelligence can be flawed would make it more difficult for politicians to justify inexcusable actions simply by claiming to know more than we do.

Perhaps we cannot blame governments for doing what they do. But we can, and should, blame ourselves if we accept uncritically what they tell us. One of the very few encouraging signs in all this is that the public's appetite for the facts remains stronger than any hunger for war.

Ronan Bennett is writing a drama-documentary for British TV on the al-Qaida Hamburg cell. Alice Perman is the researcher.