May 31, 2003
Powell Defends Information He Used to Justify Iraq War
By JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER
ASHINGTON, May 30 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the Central Intelligence Agency's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake.
The C.I.A.'s prewar assessments have been sharply questioned by some intelligence officials and lawmakers in recent days, as American forces have uncovered only limited evidence of unconventional weapons programs and Iraqi ties to terrorists.
After complaints from intelligence officials that they felt Defense Department pressure to support the administration on Iraq, the C.I.A. has started a review to determine whether its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs were accurate.
Another top official, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, insisted today that his agency's work had not been compromised by politics.
"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong."
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has also asked the agency to report on its Iraq intelligence, and may hold closed-door hearings on the issue, House officials said.
Mr. Powell used those assessments — along with satellite photographs and intercepted conversations between Iraqi military officers — in a dramatic presentation to the United Nations 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 today if he thought those assessments had been politicized to bolster the administration's call to arms, Mr. Powell said no, calling it "solid information" based on multiple sources presented to him by unbiased analysts.
"I went out to the C.I.A., and I spent four days and four nights going over everything that they had," Mr. Powell told reporters traveling on Air Force One 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 United States that was going to be on the line on the fifth of February. The credibility of the president of the United States and my credibility."
At the time, Mr. Powell was widely viewed as the most cautious member of President Bush's national security team on Iraq, and his urgent presentation to the United Nations in February was intended to provide an extra layer of credibility to the administration's case for war.
Mr. Powell argued today that the accuracy of the prewar assessments was proven by the discovery of two Iraqi trailers that the C.I.A. and Pentagon have concluded were designed to produce deadly germs. Mr. Powell presented drawings of suspected mobile biological labs to the United Nations 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,' " Mr. Powell said today. "And it was almost identical to the cartoon that I had put up in New York on the Fifth of February."
But doubts about the accuracy of the prewar intelligence have spread in Congress. In a letter sent last week to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, the House Intelligence Committee said it intended "to re-evaluate" American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorists.
"The committee wants to ensure that the intelligence analysis relayed to our policymakers from the intelligence community was accurate, unbiased and timely," said the letter, signed by the committee's Republican chairman, Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, and ranking Democrat, Representative Jane Harman of California.
A senior military commander on the ground in Iraq also told reporters today that he was surprised that Iraq never fired chemical or biological weapons as American forces drove for Baghdad, and was equally surprised that none of these weapons had yet been found.
"It was a surprise to me then, it remains a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites," said Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force. "Again, believe me, it's not for lack of trying."
Speaking to Pentagon reporters in a video teleconference from Iraq, General Conway said, "What the regime was intending to do in terms of its use of the weapons, we thought we understood."
He added, "We were simply wrong."
