Powell withdraws al-Qa'ida claim as hunt for WMD flags

[dudeness]

Powell withdraws al-Qa'ida claim as hunt for Saddam's WMD flags
By Raymond Whitaker
11 January 2004


The faltering American and British case for war in Iraq has suffered another blow with an admission by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that there was no hard proof of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida, contrary to his claims before the invasion.

"I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Mr Powell said last week. Almost at the same moment, the assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - another crucial aspect of the Secretary of State's presentation to the UN Security Council last February - was being further discredited.

Not only did it emerge that a 400-member military team tasked with searching for unconventional weapons in Iraq had been quietly withdrawn, a leading Washington think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accused the Bush administration of "systematically misrepresenting" the danger of Saddam's alleged WMD before the war. The Washington Post also reported the discovery of a document suggesting Iraq might have destroyed its biological weapons more than a decade ago, and that subsequent "programmes" existed only on paper.

snip..

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=480031

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. The window dressing speaks!

I guess O'Neill's comments awoke something in Powell.