- WASHINGTON -- Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell said yesterday that U.S. investigators have been
unable to locate or identify the Iraqi officers whose recorded voices plotting
to deceive United Nations inspectors provided a dramatic highlight to his
presentation to the United Nations last year about Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction.
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- "We can't find those guys. I don't know who those
guys were. But the tapes were real tapes. We didn't make them up,"
Powell said in an interview with six newspapers, including The Sun.
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- Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council on
Feb. 5, 2003, included voice recordings that bolstered U.S. assertions
that Hussein's government was hiding stockpiles of banned weapons and was
actively deceiving inspectors after they launched their search in Iraq
in late 2002.
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- The recordings were made from what Powell described as
intercepted telephone conversations.
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- Rank, not name
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- The Iraqis were identified in Powell's speech and transcripts
released by the administration as military officials, identified by rank
but not by name.
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- In one of the tapes, a man identified as a colonel acknowledged
having "a modified vehicle." A general tells him, "I'm worried
you all have something left."
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- In another, a lieutenant colonel relays an instruction
from the Republican Guard chief of staff for "scrap areas" to
be inspected before the arrival of U.N. teams, adding, "After you
have carried out what is contained in the message ... destroy the message."
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- In a third, a man identified as an Iraqi captain instructs
a colonel to "remove ... the expression ... 'nerve agents'" wherever
it comes up in "wireless instructions."
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- The tapes have rarely, if ever, been discussed publicly
by administration officials since President Bush launched an invasion of
Iraq last year with the chief aim of disarming the Iraq regime. No stockpiles
of chemical, nuclear or biological weapons have been found despite more
than a year of searching by American investigators led first by David Kay
and more recently by Charles Duelfer.
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- Origins questioned
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- Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, whom U.S. officials
portrayed as insufficiently aggressive in exposing Iraqi deception, later
raised questions about the tapes in a book about the affair, writing that
he didn't know where the United States had obtained the tapes.
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- "Since the occupation of Iraq, I have not seen any
discussion of these tapes," Blix wrote.
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- Duelfer told Congress on March 30 that one of the obstacles
to uncovering the truth about Hussein's weapons program is a continued
and extreme reluctance by Iraqis to talk about it.
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- In yesterday's interview, Powell again expressed disappointment
that some of the intelligence used in the speech proved to be wrong, including
his assertion that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons labs. He acknowledged
that the failure to find the weapons had affected America's credibility.
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- "I'm very disappointed that all that I said was
not accurate. Not all that I said was inaccurate," Powell said. "The
part about mobile vans turned out to be not based on good intelligence,
but we thought it was when I said it."
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- 'Best intelligence'
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- "We have not found the stockpiles that we thought
were there. But I think we have established that he never lost the intent
to have weapons of mass destruction, that he had the infrastructure for
it, that he had dual-use facilities that could have converted themselves
quickly to weapons of mass-destruction.
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- "I put forward the best intelligence information
that the intelligence community had," Powell said.
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- On other subjects, Powell:
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- # Said information about prisoner abuse in Iraq and other
U.S. detention facilities that came by way of the International Committee
of the Red Cross lacked enough specifics for the Bush administration to
launch an investigation before the probe by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.
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- # Declined to describe the abuse as torture, not wanting
to adopt a legal term, but called it "absolutely reprehensible."
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- # Acknowledged "an uneasy feeling in the world"
about Iraq, but gave an upbeat outlook for the future. He said once Iraqis
start taking responsibility for their own future, "we can turn this
around."
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- If it weren't for the current security problems, "People
would have thrown awards at us" for toppling Hussein.
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- Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun
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- http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/
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