‘CIA ignored information Iraq did not have WMD’

A NEW book on the US government’s secret anti-terrorism operations describes how the CIA recruited an Iraqi-American anaesthesiologist in 2002 to obtain information from her brother, who was a figure in Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme.

Dr Sawsan Alhaddad of Cleveland made the dangerous trip to Iraq on the CIA’s behalf. The book said her brother was stunned by her questions about the nuclear programme because - he said - it had been dead for a decade.

New York Times reporter James Risen uses the anecdote to illustrate how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction.