Regime defectors 'little use' on WMD

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq suffered a further setback today after it emerged that regime defectors had provided little or no evidence of use to coalition forces.

At least six defectors, made available by the London-based Iraqi National Congress, have been interviewed by US defence intelligence agents, but most of the leads they provided were fruitless, it was reported.

Some of those who offered information to the coalition had exaggerated their knowledge of Iraq’s non-conventional weapons programmes, according to the New York Times, citing unnamed US federal officials.

The interviews were believed to have taken place in European capital cities and at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil in late 2002 and early 2003.

In a US Defence Intelligence Agency internal assessment earlier this year, it was concluded that only about a third of the information was useful, and, when followed up, most leads failed to yield results.

Despite the setback a Defence Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, defended the move and said the intelligence “improved our situational awareness” by “making us more confident about our assessments“.

The news came amid another report that Iraq may have had fewer weapons than Saddam Hussein himself realised, prompting him into a catastrophic game of bluff with America and her allies.

Many of Iraq’s programmes to produce weapons of mass destruction were wound down in the 1990s and no documentation kept, Iraqi scientists and officials said.

Some researchers told Saddam they were producing pioneering weapons, but were in fact tricking their leader in order to siphon off funding for themselves, Time magazine reported.

The magazine interviewed a number of former Iraqi scientists, government officials and middle men over the last three months, just as coalition forces have done in the so-far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam’s henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq’s once massive unconventional-weapons programme was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt,” the magazine reports in its October 6 edition.

The 1,200-strong Iraq Survey Group is currently scouring the country for weapons of mass destruction.

In an interim report, to be delivered soon, the head of the group, American David Kay, is expected to deliver no firm conclusions supporting claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.