Iraq Missile Attacks Missed Real Targets

March 19, 2004 -- The U.S. missile attack that official launched the war on Iraq last March 19 began sooner than the U.S. command had planned. Bush administration officials apparently thought they had Saddam Hussein himself in their sights, and perhaps his two sons as well.

"We had some information from the Central Intelligence Agency that they had an unimpeachable source that Saddam Hussein was going to be in a residence in a bunker in Dura Farms," said Marc Garlasco, who was former chief of high-value targets for the Pentagon's Joint Staff during the war.

Garlasco said his group had absolute confidence in the intelligence it received. "There was no question that Sadddam was not going to be there. There was no question that there was not a bunker there," he said. "We were so certain that we basically tossed the plan for the war out the window and went with something completely new."

Garlasco planned strikes on Saddam Hussein and other top leaders using communications intercepts from the National Security Agency … satellite imagery from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency … and human intelligence from the CIA.

"We were working in the bowels of the Pentagon," Garlasco said. "You've got a lot of people packed in there, there's a lot of excitement, people are bristling with excitement and the thought is, 'We can end the war here on the first night the first shot.' "

That excitement could be heard in statements made by administration officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who appeared in the Pentagon briefing room to give updates on the progress of the war. One day after the first missile strikes, he announced, "Coalition forces hit a senior Iraqi leadership compound last evening."

The missiles did hit their marks around the farm. But there was no heavily fortified bunker there … and no Saddam Hussein. It would not be the last time during Garlasco's tenure that the intelligence failed.

The Strike on 'Chemical Ali'

"We were zero for 50 in all the strikes against high value targets," Garlasco said. "The problem is, while all of the weapons were extraordinarily accurate and they hit the targets precisely, none of the fellows were actually there."

Pentagon officials would refer again to successful strikes on Iraqi targets, such as on April, 7, 2003, when Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented video of a missile attack on the home of Ali Hassan Majid.

Majid — known as "Chemical Ali" — was a key general and governor of southern Iraq. A cousin of Saddam, he earned his nickname through the use of chemical weapons to suppress a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq in the late 1980s. Thousands of Kurds were killed.

"The strike on Chemical Ali in Basra — we were actually able to watch that one because we had a predatory drone overhead," said Marc Garlasco. "And you know we were cheering because we thought we had killed Chemical Ali. He was a war criminal and a very bad man."

"But in fact, later on we learned that there were 17 civilians killed," Garlasco said.

Garlasco left the Pentagon last April and went to Iraq to work with Human Rights Watch. The organization conducted a mission to Iraq between late April and early June 2003 "to identify and investigate potential violations of international humanitarian law" by opposing sides of the war, and "to identify patterns of combat by those parties which may have caused civilian casualties and suffering that could have been avoided."

Ultimately, both Chemical Ali and Saddam Hussein were captured alive. But in the numerous attempts to kill them and other high-profile targets during the war at least 100 civilians were killed, Garlasco said.

"Intelligence is like predicting the weather, you have a set of indicators and you think that something is going to go someway and predict what's going to happen," he said. "The problem is — unlike the weather — with intelligence, if you are wrong, people will die."

The Pentagon officially disputes the figures that Garlasco provided about intelligence failures, and said it does not keep track of civilian casualties.