Raw Data Rarely Produce Certainty

SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — Three weeks ago, I arrived home to a message on my answering machine from an official in the Bush administration. Shortly after the Gulf War in 1991, I had photographed an elaborately camouflaged building in Iraq. Now the White House wanted permission to use it in a publication it was putting out on Saddam Hussein's regime called "Apparatus of Lies."

On Wednesday, as I watched Secretary of State Colin L. Powell present an unprecedented cache of intelligence material to the United Nations, I thought of that telephone message. Among the pieces of evidence Powell used to buttress his case that Iraq was flouting U.N. resolution was a photograph he said showed a "poison and explosives factory" at Khurmal in northeastern Iraq. I've had too much experience with U.S. intelligence to believe that Powell's photo was fabricated or doctored. Neither was the secretary deliberately misrepresenting evidence. His own integrity is a sufficient safeguard against that.

Nonetheless, I believe Powell's presentation on the Khurmal camp reflects the possibility that the Bush administration -- and its least hawkish senior official -- may have slipped unknowingly into what was once brilliantly called the "wilderness of mirrors." How difficult it can be to navigate that wilderness is illustrated by the story of the photograph I took more than a decade ago on the outskirts of Baghdad.

The picture showed a camouflaged building ripped open in an aerial attack during the Gulf War. Two days after the building was bombed, CNN broadcaster Peter Arnett visited the site and aired an Iraqi claim that it had been a plant for manufacturing infant formula. The U.S. government flatly denied any wrongdoing. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called the installation a "production facility for biological weapons

"It is not an infant formula factory," Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. "It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure -- and we have taken it out."

Of that we are sure?

"Regrettably, there were a number of people in the West and the Middle East who actually believed [Iraq's] story," Defense Intelligence Agency officer John Yurechko told journalists at a Pentagon briefing last fall. Twelve years earlier, his agency had come to the conclusion that the "baby-milk plant" at Abu Ghraib was one of 13 suspected sites involved in Hussein's biological weapons program. Yurechko used my photograph to illustrate the Iraqi deception.