Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Under the Black Marker

Roughly one fifth of the SSCI report (PDF here) was redacted. The redacted material apparently included nearly all references to one intelligence source, "Red River", who failed a polygraph.

In the classified version of the report, the officials said, nearly three pages are devoted to questioning the credibility of the defector, who was one of four human sources cited last year by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a speech to the United Nations as having provided crucial information about Iraq's mobile laboratories. But in the public version of the report, released Friday, all but one paragraph in those pages is blacked out.

The defector, known to the Central Intelligence Agency as Red River, failed a polygraph examination, the American officials said. But they said crucial information about the source had been deleted from the report in deference to British intelligence, which originally relayed the information provided by the defector to the United States and has maintained a continuing relationship with him.


Deference to the Brits? Right. Perhaps a certain intelligence agency should change its acronym to CYA.

Link.