-- Posted by Henrietta Bowman on 1:24 pm on Feb. 6, 2003

Colin Powell made his case at the U.N. and unsurprisingly, I found it less than impressive. Most of his report was a rehash. As to satellite images and tapes, technical abilities to manipulate both are readily available and our government has an extensive history of fabricating "evidence."

Both American and British intelligence agencies are being pressured to come up with links to Saddam and bin Laden.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counter-terrrorism, says the Bush administration is putting fierce pressure on the CIA to produce evidence about the Iraq al-Qaeda link that it doesn't have.

"They are not getting it from the CIA because the CIA, to its credit, is telling it the way they see it, which is what they should be doing, describing the world as it is, not as policy-makers wish it to be, or hope it to be, but as it is."

"They are politicizing intelligence, no question about it," said Cannistraro, "And they are undertaking a campaign to get George Tenet [the director of central intelligence] fired because they can't get him to say what they want on Iraq."

CIA, FBI split on Iraq-al-Qaeda ties

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House's efforts to build a case for war against Iraq by linking it to the al-Qaeda terror network have split the country's state intelligence agencies, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

Several analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have complained that the US administration had overblown scant evidence linking Iraq with al-Qaeda, the paper quoted officials as saying. Some CIA analysts have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for war, the report quoted officials as saying.

At the FBI, several investigators said they were "baffled" by the White House's "insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network," the report, based on interviews with administration officials, said.

"We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there," the report quoted a government official as saying.

The report of friction within the intelligence agencies comes as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepares to go before the United Nations on Wednesday to offer new evidence that Iraq is not disarming. The drive to link Iraq with the terrorist network, blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has driven a wedge between, on the one side, the Pentagon and the National Security Council and, on the other, the CIA and to some degree the State Department and agencies like the FBI, the report said.

Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley were cited during interviews as being "most eager to interpret evidence deemed murky by intelligence officials to show a clearer picture of Iraq's involvement in illicit weapons and terrorism".