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11/06/2005:

"Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts"

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’
nytimes.com

The Niger connection

A political scandal in Italy, involving allegations that Italian secret agents followed a shady intelligence operator around London as he headed for a meeting with MI6, has called into question one of Britain's last justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

Silvio Berlusconi's government has admitted that agents of Sismi, the Italian military intelligence service, tracked the movements in London of Rocco Martino, an ex-informer, in the autumn of 2001. It did not say whether the British authorities were informed, but admitted that Mr Martino was also followed by Sismi in the US, without the knowledge of the FBI.

According to Italian press reports, however, Mr Martino had a meeting with the Secret Intelligence Service in London. A year later, the 66-year-old, who made a living peddling information to intelligence services and journalists, was the source of forged documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium for nuclear weapons from the west African state of Niger.

The documents were used by the US to make its case for war. President George Bush cited the uranium claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But as soon as the US passed the documents to the UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, it denounced them as obvious fakes.