Today’s must-read article was on the front page of the LA Times, explaining that State Department officials knew that Colin Powell’s powerful Feb. 2003 presentation to the United Nations — which convinced many Americans about the need for a war in Iraq — was wrong when he delivered it.
Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.
Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials, the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among State Department experts.
The fact that Powell’s U.N. presentation was wrong is not new. Even the fact that the intelligence community knew Powell’s presentation was wrong at the time is not new — Greg Thielmann, the former director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, which was responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat, explained five months ago that Powell’s charges were widely laughed at.
But it is new that Powell’s own State Department raised serious doubts about the charges he levied before the U.N., but Powell raised them anyway.
(And, just on a quick tangent, guess who prepared the intelligence upon which Powell’s presentation was based? That’s right, Dick Cheney’s office.)
The [State Dept.] analysts, describing many of the claims as “weak” and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might “come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons” as if they were stocked on store shelves.
The documents underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble the case for war.
Where did all of these thinly sourced claims originate? The Senate Intelligence Committee doesn’t know because — you guessed it — “Senate investigators were denied access to a number of relevant documents” by the White House.
The Times article explains, with excellent details, that the intelligence the White House was pushing was immediately seen as highly dubious by State Department officials, who urged Powell to ignore the ambiguous charges.
In their critique, State Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations.
Perhaps the best example of this was the charge — which Powell included in his presentation — that Iraq had mobile chemical decontamination trucks. Analysts found Iraq’s explanation for the vehicles “credible.”
In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
“We caution,” State Department analysts wrote, “that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives.”
The presence of a water truck “is common in such an event,” they concluded.
And yet, that’s not what we heard Powell tell the world a month before the war began:
“In May 2002, our satellites photographed the unusual activity in this picture,” Powell said, pointing to a satellite photo. “Here we see cargo vehicles are again at this transshipment point, and we can see that they are accompanied by a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity.”
So many errors, so many deceptions, so few impeachment inquiries…