The United States embassy said an article implying that the country acted o­n misinformation about Iraqi troops prior to the 1990 Gulf War, which was cited in malaysiakini's interview with US Ambassador Marie T Huhtala (right) last week, was inaccurate.

Published by the UK's Guardian daily o­n Feb 5, the article quoted another report which disputed the US Pentagon office's claim that there were 265,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks o­n the Kuwait-Saudi Arab border in September 1990.

According to the other report by the Florida-based St Petersburg Times newspaper, commercial satellite photos showed no presence of the said number of troops and tanks.

The Guardian article was raised when malaysiakini asked Huhtala to comment o­n allegations that the US had a historical record of using misinformation to justify its war o­n Iraq in 1990.

Inaccuracies

In a letter to malaysiakini late Friday, the US embassy said their state department officials had spoken to the imagery analyst and writer of the orginal St Petersburg Times report, and have sorted out the inaccuracies.

The embassy's press officer Frank Whitaker said no o­ne disputed the fact that there was a large number of Iraqi troops in Kuwait, o­nly the exact number as Secretary of State Colin Powell himself had admitted to overestimating it.

In addition, high-resolution photos taken by US satellites then showed Iraqi tanks being deployed up to the Saudi Arab border, with some even moving across the border into Saudi territory.

"The reporter and the imagery analyst have admitted since their article was written that the commercial satellite imagery available to them was not of enough resolution to reveal the Iraqi forces.

"There is also no doubt that coalition forces encountered large numbers of Iraqi troops in Kuwait when the country was freed in February 1991," said Whitaker.

He said former US Army Central Command (Centcom) commander Norman Schwartzkopf had told a broadcast interview that such pictures of Iraqi tanks were presented to a meeting between Saudi Arabian King Fahd Abdul Aziz and then US secretary of defence Dick Cheney in August 1990.

Elaborating further, he said physicist Dr Peter Zimmerman who analysed the commercial satellite's photos for the original St Petersburg Times article later conceded that "as many as 100,000 Iraqi troops may have been in the border area but were not detected in the commercial imagery because they could have been housed in existing buildings or utilising camouflage".

Skewed figures

However, Whitaker also admitted that the estimates of the number of Iraqi troops "may have been skewed o­n the high side" in part due to the exaggerated numbers released by Iraq in false messages to fool US intelligence.

"Malaysikini has earned a great deal of respect both within Malaysia and overseas for the strength of its reporting and the thoroughness of its research.

"I hope you will take the opportunity to set the record straight o­n the inaccuracies, now that the false accusations have been disseminated in Malaysia as well," he said.

He regretted that malaysiakini's interview with Huhtala did not refer to the records from the Gulf War but rather started with questions related to the Guardian article "without giving the ambassador a chance to read the full article or seek clarification o­n its allegations" first.

Meanwhile, responding to the US embassy's letter, malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan said he had written to his counterpart from the Guardian, Emily Bell, over the disputed facts in the article.

No reply has been forthcoming so far.