White House: Iraq Intelligence Not Hyped
Sun Jun 8,11:25 AM ET
URL:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=544&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20030608/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_weapons
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The White House did not hype intelligence about the threat from Iraq (news - web sites)'s suspected banned weapons in order to justify the war to oust Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), Bush administration officials said Sunday.
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They said Iraq possessed such weapons before the war and that more proof is forthcoming.
Iraqis "have had weapons throughout their history. They have used chemical weapons. They have acknowledged that they had biological weapons. And they never accounted for all that they had or what they might or might not have done with it," Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said on "Fox News Sunday."
Powell told reporters that the paper trail and interviews with Iraqis involved in the weapons programs would lead to the discovery of evidence.
"I think all the documents that are now coming forward and people who are being interviewed will tell us more about what they have hidden and where they have hidden it," Powell said.
Powell said the media, not the American people, were calling the prewar intelligence bogus.
"How can it be bogus when I can show you pictures of people that were gassed by Saddam Hussein? I can show you reports from U.N. inspectors all through the 1990s that demonstrated that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. I can show you reports where the Iraqis were caught lying about their weapons of mass destruction" Powell asked.
Powell also dismissed allegations that Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites), during several visits to the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites), applied political pressure to get intelligence officials to exaggerate their reports of the Iraqi threat.
"False," Powell told "Fox News Sunday."
"Simply not true," added Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites), the president's national security adviser, on NBC's "Meet the Press.'
Powell said Cheney was simply doing his job, delving into the issue to make sure he knew the truth.
When asked where the weapons were, Rice said: "This is a program that was built for concealment. We've always known that. We've always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programs."
She said intelligence offered solid justification for the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.
"If you connected the dots about everything that we knew about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs going back to 1991 and going all the way up until March 2003, when we launched the attack against Iraq, you could come to only one conclusion," she told ABC's "This Week."
"And that was that this was an active program, that this was a dangerous program, this was a program that was being effectively concealed." |
