POLITICO
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell wants to know why U.S. intelligence community put so much credence in a source who claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – a major factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that has since been disproved.
“It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable,” Powell said in an interview with The Guardian, a British newspaper.
“The question should be put to the C.I.A.” and the Pentagon “as to why this wasn’t known before the false information was put into the [National Intelligence Estimate] sent to Congress, the president’s State of the Union address and my … presentation to the U.N.”
Both Powell and then-President George W. Bush spoke in unequivocal terms in early 2003, making the case that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was overseeing a weapons program that put U.S. security interests at great risk.
The source “Curveball,” an Iraqi defector named Alwan al-Janabi, this week revealed that he made up stories about secret biological weapons because he wanted to see Hussein’s regime overthrown.
When Powell spoke to the United Nations in 2003, he said his claims about WMD were “backed up by sources, solid sources.” He added: “These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
Barely more than a year after the Iraq invasion, Powell said the C.I.A. had been misled in the intelligence it got about biological weapons. “Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out not to be accurate,” he said in 2004.
Powell has since repeatedly stressed that he believes he was misled about WMDs, statements that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld critiqued in his memoir, published earlier this month.
“There’s a lot of stuff [in] the press that say Colin Powell was against it. But I never saw even the slightest hint of that,” Rumsfeld said last week. Powell, he added, never spoke up in meetings with Bush to raise objections to the Iraq war.
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