Sun, Jun 01, 2003 page1

• Straw, Powell had doubts over WMD claims

  DAMAGE DONE The US secretary of state defended intelligence about Saddam's alleged possession of the weapons on Friday, but earlier he wasn't so confident

  • THE GUARDIAN AND NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons program at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq, the Guardian has learned.

  Their deep concerns about the intelligence -- and about claims being made by their political bosses, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush -- emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on Feb. 5.

  The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis. The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.

  The foreign secretary reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Blair and Bush could not be proved. The problem, explained Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the claims.

  Much of the intelligence were assumptions and assessments not supported by hard facts or other sources. Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's office of special plans set up by the US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

  Powell said he had all but "moved in" with US intelligence to prepare his briefings for the UN security council, according to the transcripts.

  But he told Straw he had come away from the meetings "apprehensive" about what he called, at best, circumstantial evidence highly tilted in favor of assessments drawn from them, rather than any actual raw intelligence.

  Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces."

  What are called the "Waldorf transcripts" are being circulated in NATO diplomatic circles. It is not being revealed how the transcripts came to be made; however, they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein's program of weapons of mass destruction was fuzzy, and who now believe they were lied to.

  People circulating the transcripts call themselves "allied sources supportive of US war aims in Iraq at the time."

  The transcripts will fuel the controversy in Britain and the US over claims that London and Washington distorted and exaggerated the intelligence assessments about Saddam's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program.

  An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC on Thursday that a key claim in the dossier on Iraq's weapons released by the British government last September -- that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order -- was inserted on the instructions of officials in 10 Downing Street.

  Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, admitted the claim was made by "a single source; it wasn't corroborated."

  Speaking yesterday in Warsaw, the Polish capital, Blair said the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the dossier was "evidence the truth of which I have absolutely no doubt about at all."

  He said he had consulted the heads of the security and intelligence services before emphatically denying that Downing Street had leaned on them to strengthen their assessment of the WMD threat in Iraq. He insisted he had "absolutely no doubt" that proof of banned weapons would eventually be found in Iraq. Whitehall sources make it clear they do not share the prime minister's optimism.

  Meanwhile, Powell on Friday fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the CIA's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake.

  The CIA's pre-war assessments have been sharply questioned by some intelligence officials and lawmakers in recent days, as US forces have uncovered limited evidence of unconventional weapons programs and Iraqi ties to terrorists.

  Amid complaints from some intelligence officials that they felt pressured by Defense Department officials to produce reports that supported the administration's positions on Iraq, the CIA has started a review to determine whether its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were accurate.

  The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has also asked the agency to provide a report on its Iraq intelligence, and is considering holding closed-door hearings on the issue, House officials said.

  Powell used those assessments -- along with satellite photographs and intercepted conversations between Iraqi military officers -- in a dramatic presentation to the UN on Feb. 5, when he argued that Iraq's weapons programs and links to al-Qaeda made it an imminent threat to the world.

  Asked on Friday whether he thought those assessments had been politicized to bolster the administration's call to arms, Powell said no, calling it "solid information" based on multiple sources that had been presented to him by unbiased analysts.

  "I went out to the CIA, and I spent four days and four nights going over everything that they had," Powell told reporters traveling on Air Force One with Bush to Poland. For three consecutive nights, the chore kept him at the agency until midnight, he said.

  "I knew that it was the credibility of the US that was going to be on the line on the Feb. 5," he said.

  "The credibility of the president of the US and my credibility."

  At the time, Powell was widely viewed as the most cautious member of Bush's national security team on Iraq, and his urgent presentation to the UN in February was intended to provided an extra layer of credibility to the administration's case for war.

  Powell argued on Friday that the accuracy of the pre-war assessments was proven by the discovery of two Iraqi trailers that the CIA and Pentagon have concluded were designed to produce deadly germs. Powell presented drawings of suspected mobile biological labs to the UN in February.

  "You should have seen the smile on my face when one day the intelligence community came in and gave me a photo, and said, `look,'" Powell said on Friday.

  Also See Story:

  Weapons reports wrong, top US general admits
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