Powell reportedly told Straw he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces"

LONDON, May 31 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart Jack Straw privately voiced doubts over Iraq’s weapons program, fueling the controversy worldwide over charges that London and Washington distorted intelligence assessments about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, a leading British newspaper revealed Saturday, May 31.

The doubts emerged at a private meeting between Powell and Straw shortly before a crucial session of  the U.N. security council on February 5, when Powell presented, in a 75-minute dramatic speech, what was described as declassified information about evidence of Iraq’s weapons program, the Guardian reported.

The meeting took place at the Waldorf hotel in New York, where they discussed the growing diplomatic crisis with Straw expressing concern that claims being made by U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Iraq’s WMDs could not be proved.

The exchange about the validity of their respective governments' intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, the daily said quoting unnamed diplomats  who were supportive of the use of force against Baghdad at the time, but now feel they were lied to about its justification.

The problem, explained Straw, was the lack of corroborative evidence to back up the WMD claims.

The transcripts quoted Powell as saying he was "apprehensive" about intelligence assessments containing circumstantial evidence, and telling Straw he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not "explode in their faces."

‘Moved In’ 

Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's Special Plans Unit (SPU) set up by U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

He said he had all but "moved in" with U.S. intelligence to prepare his briefings for the UNSC, according to the transcripts.

The respected Christian Science Monitor reported on May 23 that the CIA might be seeking to embarrass or discredit the SPU over Iraq’s WMDs as voices were increasingly being raised in the U.S. and Britain demanding an explanation for why nothing had been found.

The Monitor said that while CIA was questioning alleged ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq or the presence of WMDs in the country, it was the SPU that pushed what it claimed was evidence of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties and the presence of weapons of mass destruction in the war-scarred country.

The British Foreign Office dismissed the Guardian report as "simply untrue" and insisted that "no such meeting took place" between Powell and Straw.

In Warsaw on Friday, May 30, Blair dismissed as "completely absurd" the idea that intelligence agencies fabricated evidence that Iraq had such weapons in order to justify war.

The Waldorf meeting took place a few days after Downing Street presented Powell with a separate dossier on Iraq's banned weapons.

A few days later, Downing Street admitted that much of its dossier was lifted from academic sources and included a plagiarized section written by a PhD student, the Guardian said.

An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC on Thursday, May 29, that a key claim in the British dossier - that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order - was inserted on the instructions of officials in 10 Downing Street.

Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, admitted the claim was made by "a single source; it wasn't corroborated".

Pressured

Meanwhile, a U.S. weekly said Friday that Powell came under persistent pressure from the Pentagon and White House to include questionable intelligence in his report on Iraq's WMDs to the Security Council.

U.S. News and World Report magazine said the first draft of the speech was prepared for Powell by Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, in late January.

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the CIA, the magazine said.

The weekly further said that the White House also pressed Powell to include charges that the suspected leader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer prior to the attacks, despite a refusal by U.S. and European intelligence agencies to confirm such a meeting.

The pressure, added the American magazine, forced Powell to appoint his own review team that met several times with CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to prepare the speech.

U.S. News also said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September, arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."

‘Convenient Excuse’

In a related development, Wolfowitz acknowledged in an interview with the Vanity Fair magazine that would hit newsstands in July, that the Bush administration focused on alleged WMDs as the primary justification for toppling the Iraqi regime because it was politically convenient.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," he told the magazine.

Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Wolfowitz, recognized widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington, which is most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq, The Independent said.

The extraordinary admission suggests that, even for the U.S. administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell.

There have long been suspicions that Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy.

They come to light, moreover, just two days after Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found.

Questions are, in effect, multiplying as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty ­ given that nothing has been found in Iraq ­ or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?

As skepticism grows, London and Washington are attempting now to turn the focus of attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs, The Independent said.

A joint CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency report released this week claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs used to develop biological weapons.

But critics are not convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Powell in his speech to the Security Council, they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect.

One former U.N. inspector said that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax.