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During those four days, Powell, sometimes aided by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, rejected many doubtful claims that had strong support in the White House or the Pentagon - that Saddam had played a role in the terrorist attacks of 11 September2001, for example, or had tried to acquire Australian software which could map US terrain for a possible attack. But the most important claim that Powell refused to include in his Security Council speech concerned alleged Iraqi efforts to buy from the West African nation of Niger 500 tons of a kind of uranium ore known as "yellow cake" - a sure sign, if true, that Saddam was defying UN resolutions and trying to revive his nuclear weapons programme.
The origins of the yellow cake story are murky, but it appears that the CIA obtained documents about the purchase late last summer - possibly from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which had many supporters in the Pentagon. The yellow cake documents were shared with the British, who announced their discovery publicly last 24 September - the same day, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, that Tenet briefed the Senate foreign relations committee on the yellow cake episode in a closed hearing. Two days later, Hersh reported, Powell also discussed the yellow cake story with the Senate foreign relations committee.
But in the months that followed, doubts were raised about the documents by analysts inside the CIA and the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research. Despite these doubts, Bush, in his State of the Union address of 28 January, cited the yellow cake story as evidence that Saddam "clearly has much to hide".
The story was also included in a suggested draft for Powell's Security Council speech prepared by Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby. But when Powell arrived at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on 1 February, he made no reference to the yellow cake story. About a month later, the yellow cake documents were finally given to the Iraq Nuclear Verification Office of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been seeking them ever since their first mention by the British. In less than a day, the IAEA determined that the documents had been fabricated, and crudely at that - one of them, for example, had been allegedly signed by an official who left office more than ten years earlier.
But if Powell successfully spotted one fabrication, he was gulled by another - a 19-page report, Iraq: its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation, released by the British government the day before Powell's speech. "From our sources," Powell told the Security Council on 5 February, "we know that [UN] inspectors are under constant surveillance by an army of Iraqi intelligence operatives ... I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
The "exquisite detail", British journalists soon revealed, came not from British intelligence services, as the release of the document implied, but in largely verbatim chunks from an article in the Middle East Review of International Affairs by a doctoral student in California, Ibrahim al-Marashi, with additional information from June's Intelligence Review. Neither was cited.
None of Powell's other claims has been revealed as positively bogus, but with the possible exception of the truck labs, already mentioned, none has been confirmed, either. Some would require Iraqis to step forward and say it's so -- for example, that the weapons experts at one facility" were, in fact, replaced by intelligence officers to deceive UN inspectors, as Powell claimed. This has not occurred, nor have operational files been discovered of Saddam's secret higher committee for monitoring inspection teams, allegedly run by Saddam's son Qusay.
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