Video: 'Truth, War and Consequences (full documentary) | FRONTLINE' (Feb. 5, 2003 at 49:17)
(Wednesday, February 5, 2003) — As the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a pivotal presentation to the United Nations Security Council today, using false intelligence to claim Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The biological weapon anthrax could be delivered against Iraq’s neighbors or the US by unmanned aerial vehicles, Powell claimed, dramatically holding up a small glass vial as proof.
“Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop a nothing until something stops him,” Powell told the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq was deceiving UN weapons inspectors.
Powell’s presentation was forceful, seemingly exhaustive, and had the effect of cinching the US case for a preemptive war against Iraq before the international community.
“What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” Powell told the Security Council.
But it was not true. The underlying intelligence was false.
Before the U.S. invasion, no weapons of mass destruction had been found in more than 70 UN site inspections. And In the weeks and months that followed the U.S. invasion on Mar. 19, 2003, U.S. forces struggled to find evidence of WMD.
Years later, confronted with the facts, Powell was forced to acknowledge that his UN presentation, painstakingly prepared across several days by the CIA, was wrong.
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“There wasn’t a word in that speech, that presentation that was not vetted and approved by the intelligence community,” Powell told CNN interviewer Larry King in 2010.
In fact, Powell had been apprehensive about the US intelligence on Iraq and he confided to the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the time that he feared the doubtful claims would “explode in their faces,” according to reports of Straw and Powell’s conversation.
The bad intelligence was produced by political appointees working for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Irve Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a top aide to Cheney, and Douglas Feith, who headed Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans, produced a series of bogus claims including that Iraq had bought a uranium source from Niger and that there were links between al-Qaeda — the terrorist group responsible for the September 11 attacks — and Hussein’s government.
The two worked to incorporate the information into talking points and presentations and they targeted doubters like Powell inside the administration and critics outside.
Libby was later convicted for publicizing the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation against her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had publicly challenged President George W. Bush’s arguments.
A former US ambassador to Niger, Wilson had investigated the Niger uranium claims at the request of the CIA in 2002 and reported back that they were false.
