Powell Defends Iraq WMD Stance but Reverses Course on Al-Qaeda Link

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — All but disowning a central claim in the U.S. case for invading Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday said he believes there is a “possibility” that the Iraqi government of now-toppled President Saddam Hussein had links to the al-Qaeda global terrorist network but that he has seen no hard evidence to support the allegation (see GSN, Jan. 8).

The secretary’s remarks came in response to a report released yesterday by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholars Joseph Cirincione, Jessica Mathews and George Perkovich that indicated Bush administration officials misrepresented intelligence in making a case for war in Iraq.

Last Feb. 5, Powell presented the case for war to the U.N. Security Council, devoting more than 1,500 words to the alleged link between al-Qaeda and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government (see GSN, Feb. 5, 2003).

“Iraqi officials,” Powell said last February, “deny accusations of ties with al-Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible. … Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an al-Qaeda source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that al-Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad. Early al-Qaeda ties were forged by secret high-level intelligence service contacts with al-Qaeda, secret Iraqi intelligence high-level contacts with al-Qaeda.”

In the same presentation, Powell said an agent of Hussein was among the senior leadership of the group Ansar al-Islam, which was allegedly harboring al-Qaeda members from Afghanistan in Iraq, and that, according to a “senior al-Qaeda terrorist,” Iraq had directly provided chemical and biological weapon training to al-Qaeda members.

After the Carnegie experts yesterday called into question claims of an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection, however, Powell did not repeat or defend such assertions. “I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did,” he said.

Powell also told the council last year that Hussein was harboring Abu Massad al-Zakawi, described by Powell last February as an “associate and collaborator” of al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, and that al-Zakawi had set up a terrorist training camp in Iraq where ricin production was being taught, as well as a base for “al-Qaeda affiliates” in Baghdad. Yesterday, the secretary limited himself to defending what he called “a pretty solid case” for the U.S. claims about al-Zawaki.

The Carnegie report said, “There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam’s government and al-Qaeda.  There was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda and much evidence to counter it.” Powell did not respond yesterday to a reporter’s question about whether Iraq would have given weapons of mass destruction to the terrorist group.

The Carnegie report alleges that the Bush administration both misrepresented the views of intelligence agencies on Iraq and appears to have unduly influenced the agencies’ work. Despite backtracking on al-Qaeda, Powell generally defended the intelligence cited by the administration.

“I am confident of what I presented last year. The intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me. I was representing them.  It was information they presented to the Congress. It was information they had presented publicly, and they stand behind it, and this game is still unfolding,” Powell said.

“The fact of the matter is Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and programs of weapons of mass destruction. … There is, I think, a solid case that has been made to many governments by their intelligence agencies, and that has been the consistent view of U.N. inspectors and of the United States intelligence community, that this was a danger we had to worry about,” he said.

Powell contradicted the report’s claim that Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical programs presented no immediate threat and that only Iraq’s missile program was still in active development before the war.

Saddam Hussein “kept the infrastructure. He kept the programs intact,” Powell said, adding that the question of why U.S. inspectors “haven’t … found huge stockpiles” of weapons has not yet been resolved. “Let’s let the Iraqi Survey Group complete its work,” he said of the U.S. weapon hunt team led by David Kay.

Cirincione responded in an interview today, “All the evidence, including the testimony of Dr. David Kay, indicates that there was no ongoing capability in Iraq for the production of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, nor is there any evidence that there was a large stockpile of chemical or biological weapons left in Iraq after the mid-1990s.”

In general, Powell played down the difference between the report’s findings and the positions of the United States, saying that the report ― which he said he had not read ― indicates “there was that capability within Iraq, and they were doing these kinds of things, and they [the Carnegie experts] believe that we perhaps overstated it, but they did not say it wasn’t there.”

“Our very first finding,” replied Cirincione today, “is that Iraq’s WMD programs represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored. However, they did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security, and what we mean by that is what Secretary Powell also said: that there may have remained an intent by Saddam Hussein to reconstitute these programs sometime in the future.”

“However,” he continued, “that is not what the administration said before the war. We didn’t go to war over intent.”

The Financial Times reported today that the CIA is planning to use congressional hearings on the Iraq intelligence to defend its assessments of the Iraqi threat and to deny that the administration inappropriately influenced intelligence work.

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