BBC NEWS | "Former top US intelligence official Greg Thielman | 'The public has really been misled' Friday, 6 June, 2003

Can you give me some examples of that kind of distortion of evidence?

A number come to mind. There were examples of the evidence that was publicly cited to justify this conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program that at the time I think we assessed as unreliable or bad evidence and over time our confidence increased, I mean speaking from the State Department's intelligence bureau, our confidence increased that this was bad information and then to see it used at the highest levels of government, in front of the world, was a bit of a shock.

From the intelligence that you saw, do you believe that Iraq was an imminent threat?

I would say as a career professional dealing with these issues that I did not see Iraq as an imminent security threat to the United States. There are only two ways you can make that connection in my opinion. One is to say that Iraq was making fast progress on a nuclear weapons program, which it was not. And the second is that there were close ties between the government of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Even though this was not my area of specialty everyone I talked to in the intelligence community on this subject was unanimous in saying that was no direct connection. And yet there were so many times when the administration used Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the same sentence and you can see the effect of that in interviews of soldiers and people on the street in America when they believe that the war in Iraq was somehow getting the people who attacked the United States on September 11.
- posted by Editor @ 12:24 PM