A rchive Date
[ 25-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
|
[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2370024
Powell injects doubt into claims of WMD
He says Saddam may not have hid caches
By WARREN P. STROBEL
Knight-Ridder Tribune News
Jan. 25, 2004, 12:23AM
TBILISI, Georgia - Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged Saturday that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may not have had the massive weapons stockpiles that the Bush administration claimed before it went to war to topple his regime.
While making clear he believes the war was justified nonetheless, Powell said that if caches of chemical and biological arms are not found, the reasons for the error must be determined.
The secretary of state's remarks, made to reporters as he flew to this nation in the Caucasus, appeared to be the farthest any top U.S. official has gone in publicly acknowledging questions about the case President Bush made against Iraq before last March's invasion.
Powell's comments came a day after David Kay, who led the team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said that he does not believe Iraq had chemical and biological arms when the war started last year.
Kay left his post Friday. Asked about Kay's remarks in an interview with the Reuters news agency, Powell said:
"The open question is, how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go, and if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?"
The failure to find banned nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, or evidence of robust programs to make them, has kept alive criticism of Bush and could prove to be a significant election-year issue.
A London newspaper today reported that Kay said elements of Saddam's weapons program were sent to Syria.
"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons, but we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program," the Sunday Telegraph quoted Kay as saying. "Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."
A senior Bush administration official said Saturday from Davos, Switzerland, where Vice President Dick Cheney was addressing political and business leaders, that only time will tell about the accuracy of prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
"We won't know until we've gotten through the process of interviewing all the people who were involved in those programs and an opportunity to inspect all the sites - until we've completed the efforts that Kay started and that somebody else now will have to finish," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Almost a year has passed since Powell's speech before the U.N. Security Council in which he accused Iraq of violating a U.N. weapons ban imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait more than a decade ago.
Since then, the administration has been less categorical on the issue, contending that Saddam was actively pursuing banned weapons. The administration generally has avoided the issue of actual possession despite having spent at least $900 million in the weapons search.
President Bush, in his State of the Union address last week, cited an interim report by Kay in October in which the inspector claimed to have found dozens of weapons-related programs and equipment in Iraq.
"Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day," the president said.
Asked Saturday whether Kay's assessment was correct or whether Powell was correct in suggesting during a U.N. appearance last February that Iraq had large unaccounted-for stocks of toxins and poison gas, Powell replied: "I think the answer to the question is, I don't know yet."
Powell vigorously defended the U.S. intelligence community, whose estimates of Iraq's weapons programs reflected the consensus of other foreign governments and President Bush's predecessor.
The secretary of state played a key role in making the U.S. case. He told the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, that Iraq had failed to account for thousands of liters of deadly anthrax germs and for precursor chemicals that could make 500 tons of chemical arms.
Powell on Saturday blamed Saddam for much of the uncertainty.
"What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis. All they did was make statements without proving it," he said.
Powell did not elaborate on what sort of retrospective or self-examination should be conducted if no weapons are found. Congressional committees already are examining the use of U.S. intelligence on Iraq and the CIA is doing its own in-house review under former deputy director Richard Kerr.
Kay's replacement, former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, has previously said he does not expect new caches of WMD to be discovered in Iraq.
While the emphasis was on weapons of mass destruction as the reason to wage war on Iraq, the administration also suggested that Saddam was linked with the al-Qaida organization. Like the weapons, no firm evidence of a solid link has been produced.
On Saturday, a U.S. official in Washington said Kurdish forces had captured a senior al-Qaida figure as he tried to enter northern Iraq.
Hassan Ghul, a senior facilitator in Osama bin Laden's terror network, was turned over to the United States and is being interrogated at an undisclosed location, the official said.
On Friday, a senior American official reported the capture of a purported leader of anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq, Husam al-Yemeni, who officials said headed a cell of operatives in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
The official said al-Yemeni, linked to the Ansar al-Islam group in Kurdish northern Iraq, was thought to be a close associate of Abu Musab Zarqawi, described by some as a key link between the al-Qaida terrorist network and Saddam.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|