And I’m the Marquis du Carabas
A while back, I asked if anybody had ever heard anything about what happened with the various folks expected to give us “valuable intelligence” about Iraqi programs – including the much-ballyhooed Weapons O’ Mass DestructionTM.
Just as a side note, I love it when I get the opportunity to use the word “Ballyhoo”.
Anyway, the New York Times today reports not on Mrs. Anthrax, Doctor Germ, Chemical Ali, or any of the other folks – many of them not included in the deck of Iraqi war chemicals – who were called the “most important captures” of their time. But they do report on a program to retrieve intelligence from Iraq. A program that spent millions of dollars to debrief Iraqis who pretended to be higher placed than they were, promised intelligence they didn’t have, and provided no useful information to American intelligence.
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.Two other Defense Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, defended the arrangement. While the credibility of the Iraqi defectors debriefed under the program had been low, they said, it had been roughly on par with that of most human intelligence about Iraq. The officials also said the Defense Intelligence Agency had been generally skeptical of the defectors from the start, on the ground that they were motivated more by the money and the desire to stir up sentiment against Saddam Hussein than by a desire to provide accurate information.