IraqGate- More Lies Revealed: UAV WMD-Drones

posted by ewing2001 on Sunday August 24, @08:07PM

Experts shoot down drone claims

AP/Orlando Sentinel -Monday August 25, 2003

Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in Baghdad came to one conclusion: Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons.

The evidence gathered this summer matched the dissenting views of Air Force intelligence analysts who argued in a national intelligence assessment of Iraq before the war that the remotely piloted planes were unarmed reconnaissance drones.

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In building its case for war, senior Bush administration officials had said Iraq's drones were intended to deliver unconventional weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell even raised the alarming prospect that the pilotless aircraft could sneak into the United States to carry out poisonous attacks on American cities.

The administration based its view on a Central Intelligence Agency finding that Iraq had renewed development of sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles -- UAVs -- capable of such attacks. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency also supported this conclusion.

While the hunt for suspected weapons of mass destruction -- and the means to deliver them -- continues, intelligence and defense officials said the CIA and DIA stand by their prewar assertions about Iraqi drone capabilities, some of which Powell highlighted in his Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council.

But the Air Force, which controls most of the American military's UAV fleet, didn't agree with that assessment from the beginning. And analysts at the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said the Air Force view was widely accepted within their ranks as well.

Instead, these analysts thought the drones posed no threat to Iraq's neighbors or the United States, officials in Washington and scientists involved in the weapons hunt in Iraq told The Associated Press.

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