Colin Powell says doubts on Iraq Stockpiles may have affected his view on War by Glenn Kessler Washington Post / Seattle Times 8:08pm 3rd Feb, 2004   Washington. February 3, 2004    Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that he does not know whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had been told it had no stockpiles of banned weapons, even as he offered a broad defense of the Bush administration's decision to go to war.    Even without possessing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein intended to acquire them and tried to maintain the capability of producing them in case international sanctions were lifted, Powell said in an interview. But he conceded that the administration's conviction that Hussein already had such weapons had made the case for war more urgent.    Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He said the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get."    Powell spoke on the Iraq weapons issue for more than half of the hour-long interview. Throughout the discussion, Powell tried to balance the administration's rationale for going to war with the reality that no weapons of mass destruction have been uncovered in Iraq. Former chief U.S. weapons inspectors David Kay told Congress last week that Hussein did not have such weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion.    Nonetheless, Powell said, history will ultimately judge that the war "was the right thing to do."    Powell is widely perceived to have placed his credibility on the line last Feb. 5 when he appeared before the United Nations Security Council and offered a forceful and detailed description of the U.S. case that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In that appearance, Powell told the council: "What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."    In the interview yesterday, Powell said he had "spent much of the weekend" reading Kay's testimony last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Powell came to the interview, held at The Washington Post, with an annotated and highlighted transcript, and suggested that Kay's testimony was more supportive of the administration than many news accounts have portrayed.    Kay "did say, with respect to stockpiles, we were wrong, terribly wrong," Powell said, flipping through the pages of Kay's transcript and quoting from selected sections. "But he also came to other conclusions that deal, I think, with intent and capability which resulted in a threat the president felt he had to respond to."    Powell said, "Saddam Hussein and his regime clearly had the intent -- they never lost it -- an intent that manifested itself many years ago when they actually used such horrible weapons against their enemies in Iran and against their own people."    That intent, Powell said, was also demonstrated by Hussein keeping in place the capability to produce weapons. He said Hussein continued to train and employ people who knew how to develop weapons, "and there's no question about that and there's nobody debating that part of the intelligence."    Moreover, Powell said, Iraq continued to have the "technical infrastructure, labs and facilities, that will lend themselves to the production of weapons of mass destruction." Such facilities "could produce such weapons at a moment in time, now or some future moment in time," Powell said. "I think there's evidence that suggests that he was keeping a warm base, that there was an intent on his part to have that capability."    Powell asserted that Hussein was intent on creating delivery systems, such as longer-range missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles.    "If you look at my presentation from last year, I talk about intent," Powell said. "I talk about the capability I think is there, the stockpiles, but a large part of the presentation is also what happened" and the unanswered questions about Iraq's weapons holdings. "He got a chance to answer the questions and he didn't answer the questions."    Powell noted that when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. troops expected to be hit with chemical weapons. "We weren't hit with chemical weapons but we found chemical weapons," he said. "So it wasn't as if this was a figment of someone's imagination."    Thus, with U.N. inspectors absent from Iraq for four years, "I think the assumption to make and the assumption we came to, based on what the intelligence community gave to us, was that there were stockpiles present."    Although Kay found the years of sanctions had constrained Hussein, eventually international resolve would have weakened, Powell said.    "I think that the international community wouldn't have kept them constrained," he said. "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if Iraq had gotten free of the constraints and if we had gone through another year of desultory action on the part of the United Nations and when they were freed without threat . . . they would have gone to the next level and reproduced these weapons."    Powell said his Feb. 5 presentation, which contained detailed assertions about Iraq's possible weapons stockpiles, "reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies. . . . There wasn't a word that was in the presentation that was put in that was not totally cleared by the intelligence community."    Powell noted that not only the CIA but other intelligence agencies and the United Kingdom "suggested that the stockpiles were there."    Asked whether the American public should be reassured that so many intelligence agencies were so wrong, Powell replied: "I think it should be reassuring to the voters of the United States that we found a regime that's clearly demonstrated intent and clearly had the capability, and that the president had the information from the intelligence community."    January 29, 2004    'It turns out we were all Wrong' about Iraqi Weapons, Kay Testifies. Seattle Times    (Published by Seattle Times news services).    WASHINGTON — The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq issued a broad critique of U.S. intelligence gathering yesterday, saying the U.S. government was simply "wrong" to conclude before the war that Iraq was maintaining major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.    Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, David Kay said that contrary to earlier claims by President Bush and his Cabinet, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did not possess "large stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons and was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.    "There's a long record here of being wrong," Kay said, adding he believed that Bush and other U.S. officials, as well as U.S. allies, had based their beliefs on flawed intelligence. "It turns out we were all wrong," he said.    Kay said the errors raise serious questions about intelligence-gathering methods. "We've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong."    Bush and top Cabinet officers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, frequently cited intelligence reports that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons as justification for invading Iraq.    As for critics' charges that the Bush administration had pressured U.S. intelligence analysts to shade their assessments of Iraq's weapons programs to justify a war, Kay said he had found no evidence to support such claims.    But Kay said yesterday that the U.S. had failed to develop valid human intelligence sources inside Iraq during the past decade, relying instead on information gathered by United Nations weapons inspections from 1991 to 1998 and from other governments that shared information in what are called "liaison" arrangements. That information, he said, proved incorrect.    Later, on CNN, Kay was asked about the credibility of prewar assertions by Saddam and his lieutenants that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. "The best evidence is they were telling the truth," he replied.    Even so, Kay said in his Senate testimony that Saddam's government retained the intention to develop an arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and was therefore a serious threat. And he supported Bush's contention that the world is safer with the dictator out of power.    "All I can say is if you read the total body of intelligence in the last 12 to 15 years that flowed on Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to the world with regard to WMD (weapons of mass destruction)," Kay said.    Kay said the former Iraqi leader wanted to preserve the illusion that he retained weapons of mass destruction even after his arsenal had been largely destroyed as a result of United Nations weapons inspections in the early and mid-1990s.    Saddam, Kay said, did not want to appear to the rest of the Arab world as having caved in to the United States and the United Nations. He also hoped the impression that he had chemical and biological munitions would instill fear and diminish the domestic threat he faced from Shiites and Kurds. Both populations rose up against him after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.    Weapons inspections during the 1990s succeeded to a surprising degree in limiting Iraq's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, Kay said.    Kay said that he, too, once believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but that the work of the Iraq Survey Group, which he directed until his resignation Friday, convinced him that Saddam had destroyed his weapons caches several years ago.    Those stockpiles, Kay said, were destroyed when Saddam realized they made him vulnerable to Western scrutiny. The Iraqi leader, he said, instead plotted to retain the scientists and equipment to quickly revive his weapons programs once outside scrutiny had eased.    Until Kay began to discuss his findings in the past week, the White House had insisted that the search in Iraq would produce evidence of weapons of mass destruction.    In his State of the Union speech this month, the president largely avoided the topic other than to note that Kay had found "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."    Kay said the U.S. also had misread recent intelligence on Iran and Libya, and had failed to recognize how far both countries had gone in developing nuclear and other clandestine weapons programs.    In response to Kay's Senate testimony, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday, "It's important that we let the Iraq Survey Group complete their work and gather all the facts they can. Then we can go back and compare what we knew before the war with what we've learned since. But that work is ongoing at this point."    Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., suggested the administration had shaded intelligence reports to justify U.S. actions in Iraq. "It's difficult to draw a conclusion that it wasn't ... used selectively, and in many instances manipulated, to carry on a policy decision," Kennedy said of the prewar intelligence.    Levin questioned Cheney's statement last week that two truck trailers containing chemical equipment were mobile weapons laboratories, a claim Kay said he and others in the intelligence field do not agree with.    "I think the consensus opinion is that when you look at those two trailers ... their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons," Kay said...    David Kay was appointed by the CIA to direct the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invading U.S. forces failed to turn up direct evidence of their existence.    (Compiled from The Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times).    Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
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