TA-HISTORY: Powell: Iraq WMD case based on 'flawed sources'

US Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that evidence he submitted to the United Nations to justify war on Iraq was not "solid". At the time, he said the information about the suspected WMD had been presented to him prior to his presentation before the U.N. Security Council as "the best information and intelligence that we had".

CNN.com

Powell's speech before the Security Council on February, 5, 2003, was a major event in the Bush administration's effort to win international support for its contention that war against Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Powell said his testimony was based on the best intelligence available at the time, but he said it appeared now to be from "flawed sources.

Related news story
BBC News

Wow, ain't this hilarious. All of a sudden that "compelling evidence" that Powell presented to the U.N. that news channels made a big hype about now came from "flawed sources."

Any Bush supporters wanna try and justify this one too?

This administration, is completely, 100% full-of-#...

Kinda pisses me off that this story isn't recieving MUCH more attention...

Sure this may not seem fair to all you fellow Bush-Haters but just remember that ever since the electoral votes outweighed the popular vote this country has become a benevolent dictatorship. Now remember a dictatorship, benevolent or not has the NSA enforced right to make stuff up. So just remember folks a benevolent dictatorship can do what ever it needs to do to get oil for it's CEO (George Dubya Bush)...

Originally posted by Thorfinn Skullsplitter
Wow, ain't this hilarious. All of a sudden that "compelling evidence" that Powell presented to the U.N. that news channels made a big hype about now came from "flawed sources."

Any Bush supporters wanna try and justify this one too?

This administration, is completely, 100% full-of-#...

Two thumbs up for THAT timely assessment.

But, if you remember, during the opening shots of GW's misguided experiment to put Texas oil drillers to work, Colin Powell was (for a few weeks) the ONLY voice of sanity in the Administration - agree with then-Presidential hopeful Wes Clark that going in alone was a dumb idea, that we weren't sure if Saddam did or didn't have the manufacturing capabilities to produce WMDs that could threaten or even destabilize the region...
Then, a funny thing happened.
Colin Powell pulled a COMPLETE 180 degree turn in his stance, and was right along with everyone else in the Washington Follies.
All about the time of GW's (in)famous 'With Us or Against Us' speech.

Damn, another good man compromised. Hope history will look at what Powell did in Iraq his first time on the dirt and not as what he ran from when he should have stood on the second time in.



I'm gonna finish my coffee now, I'm mad.

[edit on 10-10-2004 by RavenCat13]

Originally posted by RavenCat13
during the opening shots of GW's misguided experiment to put Texas oil drillers to work,

Do you have a clue what you're talking about? I'm just wondering because the "oil driller" statement is ludicrous.

I'm totally in line with what you say about Powell being the voice of sanity during the wind-up to the invasion. I'm totally in line with the fact we're in there based on flawed information. But why do you have to weaken your arguments by throwing in such a laughable statement?

Can you supply the evidence behind it? Can you give me a list of oil wells being drilled because of the Iraqi invasion? Can you give evidence that there has been a substantial increase in wells spudded since the Iraqi invasion?

I don't know! Maybe you can. Maybe you can show that drilling has increased substantially in Texas or anywhere else because we're over there...but I'm seriously doubting it. Please don't tell me you're so misguided you think there's some enormous drilling activity in Iraq! lol

You ask how many?

1,821 on nine major fields with 22 total fields

www.hq.usace.army.mil...

This gets more amazing every day:

www.globalpolicy.org...

LL1

That's not what I asked. The insinuation was made that Bush invaded Iraq to put his Texas oil drilling buddies to work.

My question was: Where's the proof of an increase in drilling? Not how many oilwells already existed.

"The Majnoun field near the Iranian border is thought to have some 11 billion barrels that is, as yet, untouched. When the time comes for drilling new wells, companies such as Nabors Industries (amex: NBR - news - people ), Jacobs Engineering (nyse: JEC - news - people ), and Halliburton unit Kellog Brown and Root will bid for contracts alongside French, Russian and British concerns such as Royal Dutch Petroleum (nyse: RD - news - people )."

But the payoff is uncertain. No company is going to take a big investment risk on Iraq until its government looks stable and open to international investment.

www.forbes.com...

Hope this is of help...

Powell knew a lot of intelligence sources were flawed leading up to the war.
He even set up his own team to investigate some of the claims.
Apparently, the first draft of his speech was written by Lewis "Scooter" Libby back in January of 2003.

Guardian June 2, 2003
Fresh evidence emerged last night that Colin Powell, the
US secretary of state, was so disturbed about questionable
American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction that he assembled a secret team to review the
information he was given before he made a crucial speech
to the UN security council on February 5....

...Mr Powell's team removed dozens of pages of alleged
evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to
terrorists from a draft of his speech, US News and World
Report says today. At one point, he became so angry at the
lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he
declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bull#," according
to the magazine.
Presented with a script for his speech, Mr Powell
suspected that Washington hawks were "cherry picking",
the US magazine Newsweek also reports today.

Related articles:
CBS: Inspectors Call U.S. Tips 'Garbage' (Feb. 20, 2003)

See...my point is, speak clearly and point in the right direction. If you want to try to play the "war for oil" card, at least do it correctly. Drillers have no clout, drillers have no great political power swing, and when you say something like that you hurt your own argument.

MAJORS have the power. Here's your dirt on the majors:

ConocoPhillips just bought a $2 billion stake in the Russian Lukoil oil company. Lukoil won a contract in 1997 to develop the West Qurna oil field in Iraq, but the contract was later taken away since Saddam was under sanctions.

NOW, ConocoPhillips has positioned themselves to have a 17.5% stake in the Qurna oil field production via the buy-in to Lukoil. Lukoil would get 51% and the Iraqi's would get 25%. That production is estimated at an eventual 500,000 bopd (barrels of oil per day) when it is brought up to capacity (which would take three years).

At $50/bbl, that's $25,000,000 total revenue a day, and $4,375,000 of revenue a day for ConocoPhillips.

That's $1.6 billion a year in revenue for ConocoPhillips.

www.rigzone.com...

Everyone's seen this right? It might deserve it's own ATSNN headline.

But the fallout over all this "blame the intelligence" fervor from the Bush administrtion (like Powell above) is The CIA "Old Guard" Going to War with Bush

A powerful "old guard" faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.

The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.

Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such "viciousness and vindictiveness" in a battle between the White House and the agency.

John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: "When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences."

Relations between the White House and the agency are widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb since the hopelessly botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-sponsored exiles under President John F Kennedy in 1961.

There is anger within the CIA that it has taken all the blame for the failings of pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes.

Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. Yet Colin Powell, the less hardline secretary of state, has also been scathing in his criticism of pre-war intelligence briefings.

The leaks are also a shot across the bows of Porter Goss, the agency's new director and a former Republican congressman. He takes over with orders from the White House to end the in-fighting and revamp the troubled spy agency as part of a radical overhaul of the American intelligence world.

More leaks discussed in the rest of the article as well as speculation on the remaining days of the election.

But it's increasingly obvious the CIA is voting Kerry this year. They're upset, and not taking the blame anymore. Can a second term Bush even count on his intelligence agencies in the enivronment he's fostered? Sure he pushed away the world, but the CIA? Dumb bunny. He's paying now.



[edit on 10-10-2004 by RANT]

RANT

Do you blame them? They're the dopey incompetent idiots that blew smoke up several governtments' backsides.

I would think they better get after this effort big time so that they keep every one from looking at their gross negligence.

Do you have a clue what you're talking about? I'm just wondering because the "oil driller" statement is ludicrous.

First, I would like to thank LL1 for covering my overly-outsourced butt with some factoids supporting what I observed (and perhaps imagined) during the first few weeks of this "war".
maybe my anger is fuelled by external sources (news media, popular documentaries of the early 21st century, etc.).
Of course, I'm one who wouldn't put too much faith in the old statement "don't trust an adulturer with money in a cathouse", but that's just me... and GW WAS the 'face man for Arbusto Energy, at one time...
coincidence?

Can you supply the evidence behind it? Can you give me a list of oil wells being drilled because of the Iraqi invasion? Can you give evidence that there has been a substantial increase in wells spudded since the Iraqi invasion?

Personally, can't say I have... but LL1 DID point out some interesting factoids personally; looks suspicious enough for me... but that could also be uncanny coincidence as well...
::

I don't know! Maybe you can. Maybe you can show that drilling has increased substantially in Texas or anywhere else because we're over there...but I'm seriously doubting it. Please don't tell me you're so misguided you think there's some enormous drilling activity in Iraq! lol

F'r God's sake... I DID NOT say we were running new taplines every 12 minutes, but when we couldn't find WMDs (some we ourselves sold to our 'enemy' during previous administrations - see it here), and it possibly turns out the people of Iraq didn't want to get our help with getting rid of Saddam (especially after the botched, 'Bay of Pigs' like response after Desert Storm by George I)....
But I DID find some interesting sites related to a POSSIBLE reasoning for the US to rush into Iraq - hey, if GW can switch his reasons every 12 days, so can I - I'm an American...please debunk these carefully... so if I'm wrong, let me know... hate to get factoids confused and all.

I'm just stating what I see, read, hear, and how I interpret it. I could be wrong. But so can our President. That's the great thing about America. You can be wrong, and it hurts no one, right?



[edit on 11-10-2004 by RavenCat13]

[edit on 11-10-2004 by RavenCat13]