In your organisation's interview with Ambassador Marie T Huhtala (Huhtala: It's all about Saddam, which was published in malaysiakini o­n Feb 10), your reporter Arfa'eza A Aziz began the meeting by producing a Feb 5, 2003, article from The Guardian newspaper entitled "No Casus Belli? Invent o­ne!"

The article (and Arfa'eza) implied that the US had used misinformation to justify the action taken by coalition forces during the 1990 Gulf War, and that Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was then chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had later admitted that the US had relied o­n inaccurate or false information during the Gulf War, including classified satellite photographs from September 1990 showing Iraqi soldiers gathering o­n the border of Saudi Arabia.

It is regrettable that Arfa'eza based these allegations upon a newspaper article, rather than consulting the actual testimony of General Powell or records from the Gulf War, and that she chose to begin her interview with this question without giving the ambassador a chance to read the full article or seek clarification o­n its allegations.

Since the interview, we have consulted with the State Department, and they have spoken to imagery analysts and authors of the original story in the St Petersburg Times newspaper, which led to the allegations in The Guardian .

They have informed us that:

No o­ne disputes the fact there were large numbers of Iraqi troops in Kuwait in September 1990; the o­nly issue is the exact number.

High resolution US photos taken at the time showed Iraqi tanks deployed up to the Kuwait border with Saudi Arabia. The St Petersburg Times reporter and their imagery analyst have admitted since their first article was written that the commercial satellite imagery available to them was not of enough resolution to reveal the Iraqi forces there.

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

US satellite imagery from August and September 1990 clearly showed Iraqi tanks deployed close to the Saudi border, with some even moving over the border into Saudi territory.

In an interview with PBS' Frontline , former CENTCOM Commander Gen Norman Schwartzkopf was asked about images that he presented to Saudi Arabian King Fahd during a meeting between the king and then secretary of defence Dick Cheney in August 1990.

Gen Schwartzkopf said:

"The pictures were of Iraqi tanks. And we had the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia drawn in o­n the pictures and we showed the disposition of the tanks actually o­n the border, which showed the tanks were far forward again.

"Tanks being deployed far forward is an indication of offensive action; tanks in depth is an indication of defensive action. So we showed a picture of these tanks strewn along the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and, in fact, some of the tanks were across the border in Saudi Arabian territory."

Recognising the limitations of the five-metre resolution images used by his newspaper, Dr Peter Zimmerman, the physicist who helped analyse photos of the border area in August and September 1990 that were taken by a Soviet commercial satellite for the St Petersburg Times , says he now believes that as many as 100,000 Iraqi troops may have been in the area at the time but were not detected in the commercial imagery because they could have been housed in existing buildings or utilising camouflage.

US intelligence estimates of the numbers of Iraqi troops o­n the border may have been skewed o­n the high side in part due to Iraqi disinformation, which systematically exaggerated the number of Iraqi troops deployed by sending false messages that were intercepted by US intelligence.

The Guardian article offered no identified source or exact quotation to support its assertion that "a year later, Powell would admit to getting the numbers wrong."

We have sought the source of that assertion and found o­ne instance, in an interview with the PBS news show Frontline , when Powell responded to the question of possible overestimates of Iraqi troop strengths:

"I'm not sure how bad the overestimate was. I think at the height of the Iraqi build-up, they had probably close to the amount of force there that we thought they did, whether it was 400 or 450 or 500 thousand. I never worried about the number particularly. There were about 44 divisions and I knew where they were and it was those divisions that had to be defeated.

"I suspect that by the time and the ground war started - as a result of defections, deserters, and the intense air campaign - that 44 division force was a lot, lot smaller and much less capable than it had been at the beginning. I'm not sure how much less capable, but certainly much less capable."

Malaysiakini 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 in The Guardian article, now that its false accusations have been disseminated in Malaysia as well.