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Israeli Intelligence Based Prewar Iraq WMD Claims on Speculation, Parliamentary Inquiry Finds
Israel’s intelligence assessments of Iraq’s prewar WMD capabilities were based mainly on speculation, an Israeli parliamentary committee said in a report released yesterday (see GSN, March 24). Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Israeli military warned of Iraq’s WMD capabilities while arguing that Israel faced a low risk of attack. Even so, Israeli citizens were ordered to ready gas masks and to prepare a sealed room in the event of a chemical weapons attack. The report, released after an eight-month inquiry, says that Israel had little concrete information on Iraq’s alleged biological and chemical weapons prior to the war and that Israeli intelligence based its assessments on speculation, according to the Associated Press. “Why didn’t we succeed in laying down a broad and deep (intelligence) framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation and assumption? That is the central question,” said inquiry head Yuval Steinitz of the governing Likud Party. The committee also found that Israeli intelligence did not intentionally mislead Israeli officials about prewar Iraq’s WMD capabilities, nor was there an attempt to push the United States into invading Iraq, AP reported. “We did not take the decision to go to war. We were not telling the Americans or the British, ‘do this,’ or ‘don’t do that,’” said committee member Haim Ramon of the opposition Labor Party. The report further criticizes as “intolerable” Israeli intelligence’s failure to uncover Libya’s WMD programs (Josef Federman, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, March 29).
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