U.S. exaggerated Iraqi Weapons Claims,Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Report Finds by Julian Borger The Guardian 10:49am 9th Jan, 2004   January 8, 2004    The Bush administration will today be accused of "systematically misrepresenting" the threat posed by "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in a comprehensive report on post-war findings.    The report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is likely to re ignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims.    According to the report, the absence of any imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's chemical or nuclear programs was "knowable" before the war. There was greater uncertainty over biological weapons but no evidence strong enough to justify war.    The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq's capabilities grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of dissenting views by intelligence officials.    The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq.    The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs".    Last night a White House official responded by pointing to Mr Bush's comment on December 15 when he was pressed on the absence of Iraqi WMD. He claimed evidence had been found that contravened UN resolution 1441 calling for Saddam to disarm, a possible reference to signs that Iraq had been trying to extend the range of its missiles beyond UN limits.    Stuart Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, which oversees intelligence assessments, also defended the 2002 NIE. "We did not, in any area, hype our judgments. We made our calls based on the evidence we had. We never used the word 'imminent' in the ... estimate."    But Joseph Cirincione, lead author of the Carnegie report, said: "This is the first thorough review of the intelligence threat assessments, administration statements, findings of UN inspectors and nine months of US searches in Iraq. It shows the threat assessment process is broken. The NIE was wildly off the mark."    © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004    January 9, 2004    "Powell Admits No Hard Proof in Linking Iraq to Al Qaeda" by Christopher Marquis. (Published by the New York Times).    WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell conceded Thursday that despite his assertions to the United Nations last year, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorists of Al Qaeda.    "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr. Powell said, in response to a question at a news conference. "But I think the possibility of such connections did exist, and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."    Mr. Powell's remarks on Thursday were a stark admission that there is no definitive evidence to back up administration statements and insinuations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, the acknowledged authors of the Sept. 11 attacks. Although President Bush finally acknowledged in September that there was no known connection between Mr. Hussein and the attacks, the impression of a link in the public mind has become widely accepted — and something administration officials have done little to discourage.    Mr. Powell offered a vigorous defense of his Feb. 5 presentation before the Security Council, in which he voiced the administration's most detailed case to date for war with Iraq. After studying intelligence data, he said that a "sinister nexus" existed "between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."    Without any additional qualifiers, Mr. Powell continued, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."    He added, "Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible."    On Thursday, Mr. Powell dismissed second-guessing and said that Mr. Bush had acted after giving Mr. Hussein 12 years to come into compliance with the international community.    "The president decided he had to act because he believed that whatever the size of the stockpile, whatever one might think about it, he believed that the region was in danger, America was in danger and he would act," he said. "And he did act."    In a rare, wide-ranging meeting with reporters, Mr. Powell voiced some optimism on several other issues that have bedeviled the administration, including North Korea and Sudan, while expressing dismay about the Middle East and Haiti.    But mostly, the secretary, appearing vigorous and in good spirits three weeks after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer, defended his justification for the war in Iraq. He said he had been fully aware that "the whole world would be watching," as he painstakingly made the case that the government of Saddam Hussein presented an imminent threat to the United States and its interests.    The immediacy of the danger was at the core of debates in the United Nations over how to proceed against Mr. Hussein. A report released Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan Washington research center, concluded that Iraq's weapons programs constituted a long-term threat that should not have been ignored. But it also said the programs did not "pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region or to global security."    Mr. Powell's United Nations presentation — complete with audiotapes and satellite photographs — asserted that "leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option." The secretary said he had spent time with experts at the Central Intelligence Agency studying reports. "Anything that we did not feel was solid and multisourced, we did not use in that speech," he said Thursday.    He said that Mr. Hussein had used prohibited weapons in the past — including nerve gas attacks against Iran and Iraqi Kurds — and said that even if there were no actual weapons at hand, there was every indication he would reconstitute them once the international community lost interest.    "In terms of intention, he always had it," Mr. Powell said. "What he was waiting to do is see if he could break the will of the international community, get rid of any potential future inspections, and get back to his intentions, which were to have weapons of mass destruction."    The administration has quietly withdrawn a 400-member team of American weapons inspectors who were charged with finding chemical or biological weapons stockpiles or laboratories, officials said this week. The team was part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has not turned up such weapons or active programs, the officials said.    The Carnegie report challenged the possibility that Mr. Hussein could have destroyed the weapons, hidden them or shipped them out of the country. Officials had alleged that Iraq held amounts so huge — hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles — that such moves would have been detected by the United States, the report said.    The Washington Post this week reported that Iraq had apparently preserved its ability to produce missiles, biological agents and other illicit weapons through the decade-long period of international sanctions after the Persian Gulf war, but that their development had apparently been limited to the planning stage..
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