Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 15, 2004
WASHINGTON — Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to
present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department
analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to
new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released
last week.
Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections
that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the
Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported
were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials,
the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among
State Department experts.
Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N.
Security Council was crafted by the CIA at the behest of the White House.
Intended to be the Bush administration's most compelling case by one of its most
credible spokesmen that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein was necessary, the
speech has be come a central moment in the lead-up to war.
The speech
also has become a point of reference in the failure of U.S. intelligence.
Although Powell has said he struggled to ensure that all of his arguments were
sound and backed by intelligence from several sources, it nonetheless became a
key example of how the administration advanced false claims to justify
war.
Powell has expressed disappointment that, after working to remove
dubious claims, the intelligence backing the remaining points of his U.N.
speech has turned out to be flawed.
"It turned out that the sourcing was
inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading, and for that I
am disappointed and I regret it," Powell said in May. A State Department
spokesman said late Wednesday, however, that the United States made the right
decision "to go into Iraq, and the world today is safer because we did."
Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for
war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which
State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from
the draft or altered, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday
and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence
services.
The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and
assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an
array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against
including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against
speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological
weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.
The documents
underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were
culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble
the case for war. But the origin and full scope of some errors remain unclear
because Senate investigators were denied access to a number o f relevant
documents, according to aides involved in the probe.
The CIA rejected
requests for initial versions of what became the Powell presentation on the
grounds that they were internal working documents and not finished products.
And the Republican-controlled committee did not seek access to a 40-plus-page
document that was prepared by Vice President Dick Cheney's office and submitted
to State Department speechwriters detailing the case the administration wanted
Powell to make.
According to the Senate report, the idea for the speech
originated in December 2002, when the National Security Council instructed the
CIA to prepare a public response to Iraq's widely criticized 12,000-page
declaration claiming that it had no banned weapons. It wasn't until late
January 2003 that intelligence officials learned their work would form the basis
for a speech Powell would give to the United Nations.
Powell and
several of his aides then spent several days at CIA headquarters working on
drafts of the speech, in what participants have described as sessions marked by
heated arguments over what to include.
When Powell appeared before the
U.N., he made a series of sweeping assertions that have crumbled under postwar
scrutiny — including claims that Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, was
pursuing nuclear weapons and that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has
biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."
But the documents in the Senate report show that earlier drafts of the
speech contained dozens of additional, disputed claims; they provide the most
detailed glimpse to date into the last-minute scramble to strike those claims
from the text.
Several of the dubious statements in the early drafts had
to do with alleged Iraqi efforts to thwart weapons inspections that had been
restarted by the U.N.
One allegation was that Iraq was trying to keep
incriminating weapons files from falling into the hands of inspectors by having
operat ives carry the sensitive documents around in cars. The State Department
reviewers called the claim "highly questionable" and warned that it would invite
scorn from critics and U.N. inspection officials.
Another claim was
that Iraq was having members of its intelligence services pose as weapons
scientists to dupe U.N. inspectors. But the State Department noted that such a
ruse was "not credible" because of the level of sophistication it would require.
"Interviews typically involve such topics as nuclear physics,
microbiology, rocket science and the like," the State Department reviewers
wrote, indicating that even a well-rehearsed intelligence operative would be
hard-pressed to pull off such a charade.
In their critique, State
Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position
of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications
intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative,
less-incriminating explanations.
In one section that remained in the
speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle
circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
"We caution," State
Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible
account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the
movement of conventional explosives."
The presence of a water truck
"is common in such an event," they concluded.
The experts labeled as
"weak" a claim that a photograph of an Iraqi with "marks on his arm" was
evidence that Baghdad was conducting biological experiments on humans. The
language was struck from the speech, although Powell told the Security Council
that Iraq had been conducting such experiments since the 1980s.
State
Department analysts also made it clear that they disagreed with CIA and other
analysts on the allegation that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were for use in
a nuclear weapons program. "We will work with our [intelligence com
munity] colleagues to fix some of the more egregious errors in the tubes
discussion," the memo said.
In the speech, Powell acknowledged
disagreement among analysts on the tubes, but included the claim. The Senate
report concluded last week that the tubes were for conventional rockets.
In a section on nuclear weapons, the analysts argued against using a
communications intercept they described as "taken out of context" and "highly
misleading." There is no more information on what was in the intercept, but
Powell in his speech referred to intercepted communications that he said showed
that "Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance
gas centrifuge rotors."
Aside from the two memos, the Senate report
refers to other language that was deleted from drafts of Powell's speech,
although it is not clear who urged the items to be struck.
In one
case, Powell was to say that the aluminum tubes were so unsuitable for use in
conventional rockets that if he were to roll one on a table, "the mere pressure
of my hand would deform it." Department of Energy engineers said that statement
was incorrect.
For all their skepticism, State Department analysts did
not challenge some of the fundamental allegations in the Powell speech that have
since been proved unfounded. Chief among them is the claim that Iraq had mobile
biological weapons laboratories, an accusation based largely on information from
an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball."
What the State Department
didn't know at the time was that a CIA representative who had met with Curveball
found him to have a drinking problem and to be highly unreliable. The CIA
representative's red flags were not relayed to Powell until recently, a State
Department official said, when then-CIA Director George J. Tenet contacted
Powell to tell him that problems with Curveball would be detailed in the Senate
report.