Who's Fooling Whom?

Unable to find Saddam Hussein's suspected chemical and biological weapons, U.S. intelligence officials say they're looking into whether they were victims of a disinformation campaign meant to trick them about Iraq's weapons stockpiles, the Los Angeles Times reports. Officials are now questioning the information coming from Iraqi defectors, claiming the Hussein regime had "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West planting fabricated intelligence. They also suggest that "Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites," the Times writes. "Critics had charged that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence on Iraq to bolster support for the war. The broader question now is whether some of the actual intelligence was fabricated and U.S. officials failed to detect it. One U.S. intelligence official said analysts may have been too eager to find evidence to support the White House's claims. As a result, he said, defectors 'were just telling us what we wanted to hear.'" Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, has claimed his group provided three defectors with knowledge of Hussein's illegal weapons to the Defense Intelligence Agency. The CIA and State Department, however, had repeatedly warned that intelligence from the INC had been unreliable in the past. Chalabi's defectors failed to lead the U.S. to any concrete evidence.