Powell was Under Pressure to Use Shaky Intelligence on Iraq: Report Agence France Presse
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030531/wl_mideast_afp/u
US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was
prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, in late January.
According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material
that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and
declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."
Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information
that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an
attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the
CIA, US News reported.
The White House also pressed Powell to include charges that the suspected
leader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with
an Iraqi intelligence officer prior to the attacks, despite a refusal by US
and European intelligence agencies to confirm the meeting, the magazine
said.
The pressure forced Powell to appoint his own review team that met several
times with Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice to prepare the speech, in which the
secretary of state accused Iraq of hiding tonnes of biological and chemical
weapons.
US News also said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a
classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September,
arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing
and stockpiling chemical weapons."
However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress shortly after
that that the Iraqi "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of
chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas,"
according to the report.
Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org
Claudia D. Dikinis
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