Powell says bad data misled him on Iraq
Los Angeles Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- April 3, 2004
Washington -- Secretary of State Colin Powell directly criticized the intelligence community for the first time Friday for giving him apparently flawed information that he used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Powell said the "most dramatic'' of his allegations -- that Saddam Hussein's regime had mobile germ labs -- was based on questionable U.S. intelligence
The allegations were central to the evidence that Powell dramatically presented to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, as he urged a skeptical world body to confront Hussein.
Powell said that as he prepared for his U.N. presentation, intelligence officials gave him data from four sources on mobile weapons laboratories. He insisted that he had pushed them to make sure their analysis was correct.
"It was presented to me in the preparation of that (portfolio of evidence) as the best information and intelligence that we had," he said. "They certainly indicated to me ... that it was solid.
"Now it appears not to be the case that it was solid,'' he said.
He called on a federal commission investigating prewar intelligence to examine how the data had been gathered.
The comments were an abrupt reversal for Powell, who had acknowledged disagreements among analysts but had not criticized the intelligence agencies.