WMDs found.

[mart]

Well, at least , the source of some of the stories.

HACKWATCH. Private Eye No. 1103 2 April-15 April

The US government paid millions of dollars to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) for work that apparently included placing stories about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Sunday Times, Times, Observer, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, Express, Independent, Birmingham Post and Western Mail.
According to documents obtained by the American newspaper firm Knight Ridder, the INC still receives $4m a year for its "information collection programme" - the scheme which Ahmed Chalabi's organisation used to pass inaccurate stories, gleaned from exiled Iraqis about Saddam's WMD, to the US department of defence. But the INC also claims responsibility for getting similar stories into newspapers.
Indeed, to justify its continued funding, in June 2002 it wrote to the US senate appropriations committee boasting of its success. It referred to 108 pieces in British and American newspapers under the heading "summary of ICP product cited in major English language news outlets worldwide (October 2001 -May 2002)".
A major source for British hacks was the Iraqi civil engineer Adnan AI-Haideri, who claimed to have built underground bio-warfare labs and worked on an Iraqi nuclear programme. The INC list points to an article by Marie Colvin in the Sunday Times (17 March 2002) headlined "Saddam's arsenal revealed" and publicising Al?Haideri's claims. Colvin said a second defector had revealed the existence of seven mobile germ labs "disguised as milk trucks" and quoted an unnamed official as saying the information was "high grade". Not that high grade, it turns out.
The INC also claims credit for two articles by Damian Whitworth in the Times in December 2001 which uncritically reported AI-Haideri's claims "about the acceleration of President Saddam Hussein's work on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons".
In December 2002 Andrew Gumbel of the Independent and Toby Moore in the Express also reported AI-Haideri's claims without scepticism. The INC cites Ben Fenton in the Telegraph on the same subject, under the banner "Defector tells of Saddam's nuclear arms"'. At least the Telegraph noted that "Mr aI-Haideri's claims have not been confirmed by intelligence sources in Washington".
Christopher Hitchens is another British hack on the INC list. In his March 2002 comment piece in the Evening Standard he wrote that Saddam was "within a measurable distance of acquiring doomsday materials". He went on to praise the "heroic" Chalabi as "the symbolic and actual head of the Iraqi opposition" and his "information concerning the whereabouts of the Ba'ath party's weapons of mass destruction". The INC also claims credit for Hitchens' piece in that month's Guardian, which said Saddam "certainly has nerve gas and chemical weapons".
Hitchens cited the discredited exile Khidir Hamza to show that Iraq would soon have nuclear weapons, and used an INC source to show how Saddam was linked to the September II attacks.
This latter claim, the INC says, also appeared in a March 2002 piece by Toby Hamden in the Daily Telegraph which said Saddam "armed Bin Laden and funded Al Qaeda allies". Relying on INC information, Harnden reported that "Iraq sent conventional and perhaps biological or chemical weapons to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan".
And so on. While US journals have taken publication of the INC list seriously and reexamined their INC-linked material, in Britain the response so far has been... silence.

Mart

[Bob Singleton]

Should we be surprised by this? )