“Now, if the sources fell apart, then we need to find out how we've gotten ourselves in that position,” Powell

WASHINGTON, April 3 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that the pre-war information he gave the United Nations to justify the invasion-turned occupation of  Iraq was not “solid” any longer, heaping the blame on the intelligence community.

Before the invasion, Powell dramatically presented the United Nations with data on Iraq ’s alleged mobile biological weapons laboratories, making it the central rationale for the invasion.

“Now it appears not to be the case, that it was that solid,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Powell as telling reporters Friday, April 2, on the plane taking him back to Washington from Brussels.

“But at the time I was preparing that presentation it was presented to me as being solid,” he said.

Powell said that before his February 5, 2003, speech at the United Nations he had asked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for data that would show the danger of the weapons of mass destruction Iraq was supposedly developing, and which have never been found in Iraq to date.

‘Best Intelligence’

He said the information about the suspected WMD had been presented to him prior to his passionate presentation before the U.N. Security Council “as the best information and intelligence that we had”.

He said he had been given CIA assurances that the information he was working on was solid.

“I'm not the intelligence community, but I probed and made sure, as I said in my presentation, these are multi-sourced,” he said.

“And that was the most dramatic of them and I made sure it was multi-sourced.”

He continued: “And I looked at the four elements that they gave me for that one and they stood behind them.

“Now, if the sources fell apart, then we need to find out how we've gotten ourselves in that position.”

The U.S. top diplomat hoped that an independent commission that is going to be starting its work soon will look into these matters to see whether or not the intelligence agency had a basis for the confidence that they placed in the intelligence at that time.

Congress-pressured U.S. President George W. Bush ordered in February a bipartisan commission to probe apparent flaws in intelligence used to invade Iraq.

British reports revealed last May that Powell and his British counterpart Jack Straw privately voiced doubts over Iraq’s alleged weapons program.

The Guardian said that the doubts emerged at a private meeting between Powell and Straw shortly before Powell’s presentation.

The U.S. failure to find the alleged weapons in Iraq following the country's occupation has embarrassed the U.S. administration, damaged its standing around the world and drawn sharp criticism of its intelligence community.

The Washington Post reported last month that information about the mobile laboratories was second-hand and came from an Iraqi exile, a chemist, who had never been interrogated by U.S. intelligence officials.

The embarrassment culminated in the resignation of David Kay, the head of the U.S. 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group which has been searching Iraq for the alleged WMD, over failure to find any truce of such weapons.