Bad intelligence blamed for raids

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Erroneous U.S. raids targeting Sunni Arab political organizations were the result of bad intelligence mistakenly linking the groups to insurgent activity, a senior U.S. military official said Thursday.

Raids on the two Sunni offices last month inflamed sectarian tensions and sullied the U.S. image at a time when the Bush administration and Iraqi officials have been trying to reach out to the disenfranchised Sunni Arab minority, which forms the core of the insurgency.

The raids also have raised questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence in a fast-moving guerrilla war in which U.S. forces are regularly accused of sweeping up innocent Iraqis and acting on questionable or tainted evidence.

U.S. commanders have long acknowledged that cultural, language and other barriers have impeded the gathering of accurate intelligence in Iraq. Commanders must often rely on the word of Iraqis whose motivations are unclear. But U.S. authorities have asserted recently that the quality of intelligence was improving.

The senior U.S. military official, who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity, described the mistaken raids as innocent missteps – not a conscious strategy to marginalize Sunni Arabs, who had been favored in Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“We had bad intelligence. We made a mistake,” said the official, speaking in the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone. “We believed we had good information. And we acted on that information.”

However, the official added that the raids were not a case of mistaken identity, as some earlier reports indicated. Rather, the suspects detained had been targeted – wrongly, it turned out.

The official’s comments provided the most detail to date from the U.S. side on the raids.

For the first time, the senior military official acknowledged that it was U.S. forces who swooped down May 9 on the offices of the National Dialogue Council, a moderate Sunni group then involved in sensitive discussions with the transitional government dominated by rival Shiites and Kurds.

The council espouses engagement with the U.S.-backed government – a position at odds with the insurgency.

The other major errant raid, in which a prominent moderate was arrested, has been widely reported. U.S. authorities already had labeled the May 30 operation a mistake and issued an apology after releasing Mohsen Abdel Hamid, who heads the Iraqi Islamic Party, three of his sons and several guards.