U.S. News & World Report February 17, 2003
Prosecutor Powell
The secretary of state tells the United Nations that America has the goods on Saddam Hussein
By Kevin Whitelaw
Even for a career briefer like Colin Powell, it was the briefing of a lifetime. The secretary of state had to persuade the United Nations Security Council--and the world--that Iraq was thumbing its nose at the world body, and he was leaving nothing to chance. Meeting over pizza and Diet Cokes in CIA Director George Tenet's personal conference room, Powell, Tenet, and a group of CIA analysts spent several days writing multiple drafts of a speech marked "Top Secret."
With Tenet sitting behind him in the Security Council chamber last week, Powell made his case in a 77-minute speech interspersed with satellite photographs and recordings of intercepted communications. Saddam Hussein's dealings with U.N. inspectors, Powell said, are "all a web of lies." If the U.N. Security Council failed to hold the Iraqi dictator to account, Powell contended, "this body places itself in danger of irrelevance."
Perhaps the most startling part of Powell's presentation was electronic intercepts captured by the National Security Agency of Iraqi Republican Guard troops discussing the inspectors. In one, an Iraqi colonel informs a general that he is worried about inspections because he has a "modified vehicle" made by a firm associated with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. But when the general grows agitated, the colonel assures him: "We have evacuated everything." In another conversation, a Captain Ibrahim is told not to use the words "nerve agents" in his wireless communications.
Snapshots. But other parts of Powell's presentation were open to interpretation. Powell said U.S. intelligence found some 30 sites that the Iraqis had cleaned out before U.N. inspectors arrived. Powell explained that one site, for example, could be identified as suspect because there was a decontamination truck parked outside (which was gone a month later). But the resolution on the satellite photos was blurred to obscure U.S. intelligence capabilities, and "you do have to make the leap of faith that those blotches in the images are in fact decontamination trucks," says John Pike, an intelligence expert at Globalsecurity.org.
Powell did offer new details on Saddam's chemical and biological weapons program, based partly on defectors' reports. In particular, the secretary claimed Iraq had built seven mobile biological weapons production facilities made up of at least 18 trucks. Defectors said production at the facilities was done on Friday, the Muslim holy day, when Iraqis believed inspectors wouldn't be working, out of respect for their hosts.
Perhaps the most scrutinized portion of the speech was Powell's discussion of a series of suspicious historical contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. Most of the detail centered on accused al Qaeda operative Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan who is accused of running a terrorist network in Europe and the Middle East. Zarqawi, Powell claimed, has been to Baghdad for medical treatment and helped install a cell of nearly two dozen extremists in the Iraqi capital to provide logistics. But British intelligence rejected the link in a report last month, the BBC reported.
A Gallup Poll showed that American support for military action went from 50 percent before Powell's speech to 57 percent afterward. U.S. officials could start pushing for a new U.N. resolution to bless a war after weapons inspectors brief the council February 14, but Russia, China, and France--all of whom hold veto power on the Security Council--are still resisting the military option. Powell's sales job, it seems, is not quite finished, but his boss's patience is clearly wearing thin. Late last week, President Bush warned Saddam that "the game is over."
Copyright © 2003, U.S. News & World Report, L.P.
