On Monday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told me that he and his department's top experts never believed that Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat, but that the president followed the misleading advice of Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA in making the claim. Now he tells us.
The harsh truth is that this president cherry-picked the intelligence data in making his case for invading Iraq and deliberately kept the public in the dark as to the countervailing analysis at the highest level of the intelligence community. While the president and his top Cabinet officials were fear-mongering with stark images of a "mushroom cloud" over American cities, the leading experts on nuclear weaponry at the Department of Energy (the agency in charge of the U.S. nuclear-weapons program) and the State Department thought the claim of a near-term Iraqi nuclear threat was absurd.
I queried Powell at a reception following a talk he gave in Los Angeles on Monday. Pointing out that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate showed that his State Department had gotten it right on the nonexistent Iraq nuclear threat, I asked why did the president ignore that wisdom in his stated case for the invasion?
"The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote," Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union speech? "That was a big mistake," he said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it."
When I pressed further as to why the president played up the Iraq nuclear threat, Powell said it wasn't the president: "That was all Cheney." A convenient response for a Bush family loyalist, perhaps, but it begs the question of how the president came to be a captive of his vice president's fantasies.
More important: Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistle-blower Wilson, whose credibility the president then sought to destroy?
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House vehemently denounced a US newspaper report suggesting President George W. Bush insisted on the existence of biological weapons laboratories in Iraq while knowing the claim was false.
The Washington Post said Wednesday that Bush and other top administration officials cited two trailers found in Iraq as evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons program even though Pentagon experts had found they were probably designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan condemned the newspaper report as "reckless", saying Bush had based his assertions on intelligence assesssments.
"And for you all to go on the air this morning and make such a charge is irresponsible," McClellan told reporters.
On May 29, 2003, Bush proclaimed that the trailers, located just weeks after the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq, were long-sought mobile "biological laboratories".
"We have found the weapons of mass destruction," the president said confidently at the time.
Two days before the president's statement, however, a secret Pentagon-sponsored mission had returned findings that the trailers were not suited for the production of biological weapons, according to the Post, citing unnamed government officials.
The claim was repeated by top administration officials for months, even though US intelligence officials had received the findings of the Pentagon experts determining that the allegations were not true, the Post reported.
The White House said Bush was not aware of the findings by the fact-finding mission and had based his remarks on a "white paper" issued by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"The president's comments were based on the intelligence assessment of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency that was publicly released on May 28, 2003," McClellan said.
"In fact, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency had jointly assessed at the time that the labs were for producing biological weapons," he added.
The newspaper report renewed attention on the Bush administration's rationale for going to war in Iraq amid declining approval ratings for Bush and mounting public anxiety over the war.
In the run-up to the war, the trailers were presented as crucial evidence by the Bush administration to back its assertion that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.
The administration has denied persistent allegations that it manipulated intelligence to justify military action.
The Pentagon confirmed the existence of the expert team's report but would not say what the team's findings were.
The Defense Intelligence Agency-sponsored Technical Exploitation Team filed their preliminary report on the trailers on May 27, 2003, it said.
The DIA team's report was sent to a center that worked with the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-led team responsible for the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and was also faxed directly to the Iraq Survey Group, the Pentagon said.
Despite the findings of the expert team, the CIA-DIA assessment on May 28, 2003 cited by the White House on Wednesday held that US officials were confident that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons production".
The assessment "reflected the position of the intelligence community at that time," Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Commander Greg Hicks said.
As more information was gathered and analyzed by experts, it eventually became clear that the trailers were not designed for biological weapons, Hicks said.