Monday, 26 April 2004

US keeps intelligence secret from British

So our government is making decisions based on.... what precisely? These bloody people are even bigger morons than I thought they were!

The Americans are preventing the British and other key allies in the war on terrorism from seeing intelligence that could save lives, a US conference on military intelligence has been told.

British and Australian officers working in allied command centres during the war in Iraq were not allowed access to the intelligence they needed to do their job, one Australian complained.

RAF and RAAF officers were asked to leave the room during briefings, though some of the information they were prevented from seeing had been provided by the British or Australian intelligence services.

"They gave us stuff and we labelled it secret and then they weren't allowed to see it," said Col Allen Roby, director of the US air force intelligence directorate, one of a number of speakers and delegates who complained about the issue.

The US military's failure to share intelligence fully with its major allies dominated the conference after it was raised by Wing Commander Alex Gibbs, a member of the air attache's office at the Australian embassy in Washington.

It was easy to spot the British and Australian officers working in the allied combined air operations centre in Saudi Arabia during the Iraq war because they had to have an American sitting alongside them accessing the computer, he said.

The British and Australian officers had to ask an American to search the databases and tell them what they were allowed to know, one USAF delegate confirmed. "You could look over his shoulder but you couldn't touch the keyboard."

Maj-Gen Tommy Crawford, commander of the US air force intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance centre, confirmed to the conference that the problem still existed, adding that it also affected other close US allies such as Canada.

Responding to a series of questions from American delegates clearly unable to comprehend the policy, Gen Crawford insisted that it was not a problem dictated by the Pentagon and that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, wanted it changed.

Full story...