At 10:30 the following morning, Powell addressed the international body. “George was on the team, and that itself is an issue,” Wippl would later reflect. Consider what the world of media would look like without The Intercept. After one query, Hannah produced a New York Times article as his source. The German intelligence agency handling Curveball “has not been able to verify his reporting,” Wippl warned. So it needs to be more convincing. As it happened, there was a more innocent explanation for the mapping software. When another C.I.A. When Bush asked, “What should I do?” his secretary of state could have spoken his mind and said, “Don’t invade Iraq.” But he didn’t. Unfortunately, Congress never investigated Powell’s use of the intelligence he was given, so we don’t know many of the specifics. The presentation was referred to internally at the C.I.A. The two had traveled in the same foreign-policy circles for decades, but their collegiality had begun to fray over Iraq. Cheney — a figure of legendary discretion whose Secret Service code name at one time was Back Seat — had come to believe that Colin Powell was playing for Colin Powell. KAMEL: No. Colin Powell, secrétaire d'État des États-Unis, tenant une capsule d' anthrax, lors d'une session du Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies, prétendant que l'Irak est susceptible de posséder des armes de destruction massive, 5 février 2003. What could go wrong? The speech remains one of the most indelible public moments of the Bush presidency. On Tuesday, it was Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s Republican secretary of state who played an instrumental role in leading America into war with Iraq. Opposition? They directly contradicted Powell on the aluminum tubes issue, but also warned him many of his claims were “weak,” “not credible,” or “highly questionable.” Here are some of the examples the memos give. McLaughlin was a beloved figure among the agency’s analysts. The deputy director told the analysts that the White House had asked for their best story on Iraq. The only reason he bought the mapping software, he said, was because he thought the hardware wouldn’t work without it. Now, with that for context, it’s useful to look back at what Powell said in a November, 2005 interview with Barbara Walters: There was some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. "Dealing with Iraq would show a major commitment to antiterrorism," Don Rumsfeld said. analysts knew only that he once had such a stockpile, before the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and that it was thought to be as much as 500 metric tons before the weapons were destroyed. To the caucus, he said: “You may not trust Dick Cheney. Powell spoke ruefully of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — men he had known for years, both of whom had changed, he told Straw, and not for the better. Powell was tasked with presenting the case for invading Iraqto the UN General Assembly, and he dutifully went ahead. In August 2018, in the course of researching a book on the lead-up to the Iraq war, I went to see Powell at the office in Alexandria, Va., that he has maintained since leaving the Bush administration in early 2005. “But I knew I didn’t have any choice,” Powell told me. “There’s only so many times I can go toe to toe with the V.P.,” he said. Iraq, it was by then widely understood, had played no role in the Sept. 11 attacks, nor did it possess weapons of mass destruction. “And so they’ve given O.V.P. And it’s no surprise the Iraqi said this. “The president doesn’t think it’s nearly persuasive enough,” Cheney’s chief of staff said. Powell is a recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America. They included Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; the under secretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith; Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; and Cheney himself. Clearly, Powell’s loyalty to Bush extended to being willing to deceive the world: the United Nations, Americans, and the coalition troops about to be sent to kill and die in Iraq. But, he noted, Bush did not dismiss it outright, saying instead, “OK, we’ll leave Iraq for later.”, Bush was true to his word. “The first thing they teach you in C.I.A. As measured and even-tempered as Tenet was mercurial, he wore natty suspenders but was otherwise a by-the-book professional who pored over classified documents with a ruler, sliding it slowly downward line by line. What if he had said no to Bush when he asked him to speak before the U.N.? As mentioned above, the State Department’s intelligence staff, called the INR, prepared two memos on the presentation. At the beginning of one meeting, Richard Armitage, Powell’s deputy secretary, genially offered the vice president some coffee. officials not present in the conference room who seriously doubted much of the National Intelligence Estimate’s contents. Missiles with biological warheads reportedly dispersed. last bullet. It is Exhibit A for the argument that would help propel Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 — that the U.S. government was not on the level, that the “establishment” figures of both parties were at once fools and manipulators. Wolfowitz thought Cheney’s chief of staff had done a great job. The next morning, Cheney’s staff got to work on their alternative presentation. ‘‘He’s the president.’’Credit...Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times. As an intelligence official — one of many who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity — said: “We knew where we were headed, and that was war. At one point during our first conversation in 2018, he paraphrased a line about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction from the intelligence assessment that had informed his U.N. speech, which intelligence officials had assured him was rock solid: “ ‘We judge that they have 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical weapons, all produced within the last year.’ How could they have known that?” he said with caustic disbelief. “I told him, ‘Removing Saddam is the easy part,’” he said. “The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s important to keep the job.”. Smirking, he replied, “You might tell them I’m curious about it.”. Colin Powell: Invasion of Iraq 'Badly Flawed' Former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday said that the Bush Administration made "terrible strategic mistakes" during the Iraq … Gen. Colin Powell discusses the Iraq War and his presentation to the United Nations. He certainly was: POWELL: My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. The C.I.A. Do something with that popularity.’” But, Powell added to his aide, he wasn’t sure he could say no to Bush anyway. The house belonged to the billionaire Ronald Lauder, who for most of August was hosting his good friend and Straw’s American counterpart, Colin Powell. All other sources are linked below. As you’ll see, there’s quite a lot to say about it. If Powell said Hussein presented an immediate danger to the United States, then surely it was so. The day after he returned to London, Straw warned Blair that he should not dismiss the prospect of Bush’s unilaterally taking his country to war. His appointment by Bush and Cheney, then the secretary of defense, also turned out to be a stroke of political genius. analysts to argue why any of it should be thrown out. Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. Whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction or not was being investigated by Hans Blix, head of the commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. POWELL: A dozen [WMD] experts have been placed under house arrest, not in their own houses, but as a group at one of Saddam Hussein’s guest houses. Later, regarding whether Iraq had reconstituted a nuclear weapons program, he said: That’s in public. The analysts who provided the intelligence now say it … And so I think that’s when he really starts thinking, I’ve got to get something done in Iraq.”. This was, I learned, typical of the prewar intelligence estimates: They amounted to semi-educated guesses built on previous and seldom-challenged guesses that always assumed the worst and imagined deceptiveness in everything the Iraqi regime did. Rumsfeld was adamant that the United States should not be slowed down by coalition-building. “The really strong stuff was Curveball,” remembered Bill McLaughlin, a C.I.A. Colin Powell in Virginia this month. Partager. Bush also understood the power that Powell’s popularity conferred on him, and he knew that Powell, who had once considered and decided against running for president, could change his mind anytime he wished. analysts warned that Iraq’s alleged chemical-weapon decontamination trucks could simply be water trucks. This appears in Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack”: Powell had decided to add his personal interpretation of the intercepts to the rehearsed script, taking them substantially further and casting them in the most negative light. “Good,” Powell said. “The agencies have attached confidence levels to them.”, Rice studied her copy, frowning. Among the items was Garmin GPS software that included maps of major American cities. And although Powell would not admit it, Bush’s request that he be the one to make the case against Hussein to the U.N. was enormously flattering. Indeed, in the U.N.’s notes from Kamel’s debriefing, he says Iraq had no remaining WMD of any kind: KAMEL: All chemical weapons were destroyed. “Undeniable. After first scrapping the entire section dealing with Iraq’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda, the secretary tasked Carl Ford, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (I.N.R. ‘‘I knew I didn’t have any choice,’’ he said. McLaughlin reviewed them with astonishment. “About 90 percent?”, The national security adviser gaped at Walpole and McLaughlin. IRAK - Colin Powell exige des réponses sur les fausses informations L'ancien secrétaire d'État américain avait affirmé à l'ONU que Saddam Hussein disposait d'armes de … The audience included Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. Tenet suggested that he base the new speech on the National Intelligence Estimate relating to Iraq’s weapons capability that had been thrown together in less than three weeks the previous September. Did you know he said there were no WMDs? They were later quietly released as appendices to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on WMD intelligence. Since the State Department was questioned about this by journalist Gilbert Cranberg, the translation at variance with Powell’s version has disappeared from its site. the assignment of redoing that.”. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”. Here’s a transcript of an exchange between Powell and Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington in December 2006, with video below: HUSSEINI: You cited Hussein Kamel in your U.N. testimony. “I’m in that photo,” the munitions expert whispered to Cagle. “This is all there is?” he asked when they convened again. The presentation on the vendor’s web page seemed to confirm this account. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” Powell said in his calm, sonorous baritone. Colin Powell Still Wants Answers In 2003, he made the case for invading Iraq to halt its weapons programs. But by the summer of 2002, this argument was clearly losing ground. Libby had instructed his Middle East specialist to put every damning bit of raw intelligence he could find into his brief. During the gulf war, his poise and resolve on television rallied Americans leery of foreign entanglements after the horror of Vietnam. He left it four years later, discarded by Bush in favor of a more like-minded chief diplomat, Condoleezza Rice. Powell played an intercept of a conversation between Iraqi army officers about the U.N. inspections. “You’ve got to get Tony to convince the president to go to the U.N.,” he said. Still, Powell could see that his grim prophecy to the president — “this will become your first term” — registered. “If you break it, you own it,” he famously told Bush. Once they were seated, Grossman got right to the point. And yet Powell’s “you break it, you own it” warning to the president would be overshadowed by the fact that he was also the war’s most effective salesman. At the U.N., Powell described a satellite picture this way: The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions…The truck you […] see is a signature item. Colin Powell delivered his presentation making the case for war with Iraq at the United Nations 15 years ago, on February 5, 2003. Once the decision was made that Powell would deliver the U.N. speech, he was handed the text that Libby’s team had prepared. Colin Powell presented the case against Iraq to the UN Security Council five years ago today, on February 5, 2003. “Like a smoking gun,” the deputy director explained. We haven’t landed this yet.” Powell was Blair’s ally in this cause, but Straw could see that the secretary of state was only a single voice in Bush’s ear, and not necessarily the one that counted. “ ‘You’ll be the proud owner of 25 million Iraqis in 18 fractious provinces.’” They talked for three hours. “Nice try,” the president said to McLaughlin. Whenever Powell seemed concerned about a particular claim, Tenet’s staff would usher in what seemed to be the proper analyst to affirm the source’s validity. This was particularly evident on the subject of Hussein’s biological-weapons capabilities. Still, before Powell was to deliver his U.N. speech, the deputy director instructed Slick to check on Curveball’s “current status/whereabouts.” Slick’s memo to Drumheller on Feb. 3 said, “A great deal of effort is being expended to vet the intelligence that underlies SecState’s upcoming U.N. presentation.”, But the memo made no mention of a cable that had been sent to the agency’s headquarters a week before by the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Berlin, Joe Wippl. In the audience in the Security Council chamber was a young U.N. weapons inspector named Dawson Cagle, who had recently returned from Baghdad. second bullet. Moreover, a circular reasoning guided the intelligence community’s prewar estimates. When Bush and the rest of his senior foreign-policy team gathered at Camp David four days after the attacks, Powell argued that the world would support such a mission — but that a global coalition would fall apart if the U.S. began attacking other countries. HUSSEINI: You didn’t know that, even though it was reported? This claim is highly questionable and promises to be targeted by critics and possibly UN inspection officials as well. Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don’t think so. Between I.N.R.’s factual objections and Hannah’s halting command of the material, Powell was fast losing faith in the work by Libby’s team. Bush, the Harlem-born son of Jamaican immigrants had prevailed over racism, hard-ass generals in the Army and right-wingers who found him insufficiently hawkish. It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced 4 tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. “Everybody’s in the room,” Bartlett recalled. The story Powell told marked a departure from the Bush administration’s evocations of madness, evil and mushroom clouds. Powell’s speech can be found on the State Department website here. It was arguably the most important message that Bush would hear from any of his subordinates in his entire presidency — and, in what Powell left out of the message, the most important missed opportunity. In 2003, he made the case for invading Iraq to halt its weapons programs. **/WEAK. The general had directed the procurement agent to buy equipment for Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicles program. In the spring of 2002, the agent had given an Australian equipment distributor his shopping list. At Camp David, Wolfowitz went so far as to argue that Hussein was most likely behind the Sept. 11 attacks. According to Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, here’s what Powell was thinking at the time: WILKERSON: [Powell] had walked into my office musing and he said words to the effect of, ‘I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing.’.