"There are many smoking guns," Colin Powell would say afterward.

For 80 minutes in a hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, the U.S. secretary of state unleashed an avalanche of allegations: The Iraqis were hiding chemical and biological weapons, were secretly working to make more banned arms, were reviving their nuclear bomb project. He spoke of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."

It was the most comprehensive presentation of the U.S. case for war. Powell marshaled what were described as intercepted Iraqi conversations, reconnaissance photos of Iraqi sites, accounts of defectors, and other intelligence sources.

The defectors and other sources went unidentified. The audiotapes were uncorroborated, as were the photo interpretations. No other supporting documents were presented. Little was independently verifiable.

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Declared (Nuclear) Threat Grew, As Support for It Eroded

Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence (Updated Title)

Washington Post Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01

By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus

His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.

An engineer turned CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.

At the time, Iraq was trying to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets. But the U.S. government said those tubes were for something more serious: centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb.

Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was ``overspecified,'' ``inappropriate'' and ``excessively strong.'' No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket.

... The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied.

Overstatement seen in Bush's case for war...

http://www.chicagotribune.com

"Four months after Baghdad's fall, virtually all U.S. allegations about Iraq's destructive capabilities remain unproven or in dispute

But the violence and strife roiling U.S.-occupied Iraq, including a vehicle bombing Thursday that killed at least 11 people in Baghdad, is emboldening critics who maintain the White House overstated its primary case for war: that Iraq posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States.

Four months after U.S. forces seized Baghdad, an in-depth look at that case shows that virtually all the administration's allegations regarding Iraq's destructive capabilities remain unproven or in dispute, according to outside experts, former intelligence analysts and a variety of foreign-policy think tanks."


More....
http://www.chicagotribune.com

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