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Powell '01: WMDs Not 'Significant'
Sept. 26, 2003

The debate over whether the Iraqi weapons threat was real or exaggerated by the Bush administration focused Thursday on a few words spoken more than two years ago by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

War opponents and some Congressional Democrats have pointed to a statement Powell made on Feb. 24, 2001, while meeting at Cairo's Ittihadiya Palace with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

War critics said the remark bolstered their suspicions that the administration deliberately inflated the threat Iraq posed, because Powell's depiction of Iraq in the run-up to war painted a different picture.
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Powell's doubts over CIA intelligence on Iraq prompted him to set up secret review
Specialists removed questionable evidence about weapons from draft of secretary of state's speech to UN

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian

Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.

Mr Powell conducted a full-dress rehearsal of the speech on the eve of the session at his suite in the Waldorf Astoria, his New York base when he is on UN business, according to the authoritative US News and World Report.

Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the CIA's intelligence on Iraq.

Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.

Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking", the US magazine Newsweek also reports today. Greg Theilmann, a recently retired state department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, says that inside the Bush administration "there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused"....