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Powell's battle cry fails test of time
Six months after his case swung opinion toward attacking Iraq, his intelligence file looks thin.
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press

One evening in February, in a stifling Baghdad conference room, Iraqi bureaucrats, European envoys and foreign reporters crowded before television screens to hear the reading of an indictment.

Half a world away, in the hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was unleashing an avalanche of allegations, speaking of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."

Powell marshaled what were described as intercepted Iraqi conversations, reconnaissance photos of sites, defectors' accounts, and other intelligence sources.

In the United States, his intelligence file swung opinion toward war.

But in Baghdad, when the satellite broadcast ended, Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi, science adviser to Saddam Hussein, appeared before the audience and dismissed the U.S. case as "stunts" aimed at swaying the uninformed.

How does Powell's Feb. 5 indictment look today? He has said several times since then that he stands by it, the State Department said last week. Here is an Associated Press review of major elements, based both on what was known in February and what has been learned since...