WASHINGTON, 9 June 2003 — Top Bush administration officials yesterday rejected accusations they exaggerated threats posed by Iraq’s weapons, calling the charges “outrageous” and the results of “revisionist history.”
Appearing on morning news programs, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said there was broad consensus in the intelligence community that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they believe that intelligence was sound.
“We have no doubt whatsoever that over the last several years, they have retained such weapons or retained the capability to start up production of such weapons,” Powell said on CNN’s Late Edition.
“We also know they are masters of deceit and masters of hiding these things, and so a little patience is required,” he said. Powell called it “really somewhat outrageous on the part of some critics to say that this was all bogus.”
Concerns have been rising worldwide that the arsenal of weapons of mass destruction described by the administration has not been found in the weeks after the war that toppled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Critics questioning whether the administration used faulty or manipulated intelligence as grounds for war point to a Defense Intelligence Agency report from September of 2002, disclosed last week, that said the agency did not have enough “reliable information” on Iraq’s alleged chemical weapons. Powell and Rice said that quote was taken out of context, giving a misleading impression of the report.
A line “talked about not having the evidence of current facilities and current stockpiling. The very next sentence says that it had information that (chemical) weapons had been dispersed to units,” Powell said on Fox News yesterday.
According to the Washington Post’s Saturday editions, the report said that “although we lack any direct information, Iraq probably possesses chemical agent in chemical munitions” and “probably possesses bulk chemical stockpiles, primarily containing precursors, but that also could consist of some mustard agent and VX,” a deadly nerve agent.
Rice, on ABC’s This Week, said a national intelligence estimate in October — which the DIA signed — said Iraq likely had as much as 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical agents.
“There’s a very large body of evidence here that connects together to paint a picture of a very dangerous regime with very dangerous weapons that had deceived the world for 12 years, that had allowed international sanctions to stay on, rather than come clean about what it was doing,” she said.
Rice several times said critics were using “revisionist history” to question whether Iraq had weapons that threatened the United States.
Powell also defended US charges that two mobile laboratories were for biological agents, saying on Fox that “my best justification” for that was “if they were not biological labs, I can assure you, the very next morning, the Iraqis would have pulled them out and presented them” to UN weapons inspectors and the international press corps.
Iraq Had WMD Labs, but No Weapons: Report
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, quoting a former Iraqi general that Saddam Hussein had a network of small labs that conducted research on chemical and biological weapons, but did not have any such weapons.
The goal of the secret labs, set up after 1996, was to rebuild Iraq’s banned weapons programs once United Nations sanctions were lifted, the source — described as a brigadier general who insisted on anonymity — told the Times.
Each team had up to four scientists unknown to UN inspectors, and worked on computers and conducted “crude experiments in bunkers and back rooms in safe houses around Baghdad,” according to the Times.
Although the general’s accounts could not be verified, the Times wrote, he “appeared highly knowledgeable about the development, production and deployment of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons and missiles in the past.”
The general, who granted the interview in exchange for placing a satellite phone call on a line that would not be traced, insisted that Iraq did not produce any chemical or biological weapons, but that plans were in place to develop them. “We could start again anytime,” the officer told the Times. “It’s very easy. Especially biological.”
“The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge,” said the general. But US weapons inspectors “will never find anything here. Only oil.” The general also said that some Iraqi defectors interviewed by US and other intelligence agencies were Iraqi double agents.
“They let the Americans think they were anti-Saddam,” he told the Times. “But they were still reporting back to Saddam.”
In an unrelated development, Powell yesterday called on Iranians to press their leaders to abandon support for terrorism and their drive to develop nuclear weapons.
“Iran is a problem. It continues to support terrorism. It continues to develop, we believe, the capability to produce nuclear weapons, and this is troublesome,” Powell said on Fox News Sunday.
But he stressed that young Iranians were realizing that their political and religious leaders were not steering them “in the right direction toward a better future.”
