United States Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged on Friday that pre-war information he gave the United Nations on Iraq’s mobile chemical and biological weapons laboratories to justify the US-led war on Iraq was not ”solid”.
This admission came as the administration of US President George Bush was accused on Friday of blocking the public commission of enquiry into the September 11 attacks from seeing thousands of documents about former president Bill Clinton’s counter-terrorism measures.
Before the US-led war on Iraq, Powell had presented the UN with data proclaiming to prove that Iraq was engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction.
”Now it appears not to be the case, that it was that solid,” Powell told reporters on the plane taking him back to Washington from a trip to Brussels.
”But at the time I was preparing that presentation it was presented to me as being solid,” he said.
On Friday a former Clinton aide alleged that 11 000 pages of documents dealing with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and related issues had been made available but the White House had let the commission see only a quarter of them.
A White House spokesperson said the withheld documents were either duplicates or irrelevant, but commission officials questioned that explanation and said negotiations with the administration would continue.
The documents row is the latest in a series of controversies to emerge from the bipartisan commission’s inquiry into US preparedness for the 2001 attacks. The inquiry has become an election-year battleground between Republicans and Democrats over who had acted more effectively against terrorism.
Under intense pressure the White House has agreed to let the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, give sworn public testimony to the commission. She will appear next Thursday.
She will be asked to explain a draft speech she was due to deliver on September 11 2001, which, according to leaked excerpts, dealt more with on the need for an anti-ballistic-missile system than the need to take on al-Qaeda.
In interviews she has argued that the White House intended to take far more decisive action against al-Qaeda and its Afghan backers, the Taliban, than the preceding administration had contemplated.
In support of that argument, the White House released a directive that was awaiting presidential signature on September 11 2001 directing the Pentagon to plan attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, ”including leadership, command-control-communication, training and logistics facilities”.
But such action was presented as a last resort after three to five years of diplomatic and economic pressure.
The row about the Clinton-era documents exposes the administration to the allegation that it is trying to suppress information in fear that it will make the Bush White House appear tentative.
Bruce Lindsey, a Clinton White House legal adviser who now works for his presidential foundation, said he had discovered in February that three-quarters of the 11 000 pages passed to the National Archives in Washington had been held back from the commission by the White House.
”I voiced a concern that the commission was making a judgement on an incomplete record,” he told the New York Times. ”I want to know why there is a 75% difference.”
Al Felzenberg, a spokesperson for the commission, said: ”We need to be satisfied that we have everything we have asked to see. ”We have voiced the concern to the White House that not all of the material the Clinton library has made available to us has made its way to the commission.”
A White House spokesperson, Sean McCormack, said the documents that had not been turned over were not relevant to the enquiry.
”We’re applying the same standards to documents from our administration and from the Clinton administration,” he said.
But the commission’s staff director, Philip Zelikow, said that although there were duplicates in the stack of Clinton-era documents handed over to the archives, his team had identified two documents from them that were relevant to the commission’s work but had not been turned over.
Pakistan still battles al-Qaeda
Meanwhile, Pakistan has deployed several thousand additional soldiers to the lawless north in a continuing effort to capture or kill al-Qaeda fighters and other Islamic militants hiding there, senior officials said on Friday.
About 3 500 were sent to South Waziristan, the largest of northern Pakistan’s practically autonomous tribal regions, on Thursday. Their deployment takes the total number of soldiers in Waziristan to an unprecedented 13 500.
The reinforcements arrived shortly after a 12-day battle between the army and several hundred militants that killed more than 120 people .
During the battle President Pervez Musharraf excited speculation that a ”high-value” al-Qaeda figure was among the besieged militants.
Army sources later backtracked on this, and also said that less than half of the 167militants taken prisoner were foreign fighters. The foreigners are believed mostly to be from central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, but including few Arabs.
An official said on Friday that the army was contemplating a further sweep through northern Waziristan, where regular troops have seldom ventured since British colonial times.
Though a vocal US ally in the war on terror, Pakistan had resisted US demands for it to cleanse the tribal areas of Islamic militants, including many fugitives from Afghanistan. The Pakistani army and intelligence agencies are often accused of maintaining links with militant groups, especially the fugitive Taliban, whose movement was founded in Pakistan.
Speaking of Pakistan’s guest militants on state television this week, Musharraf said: ”We will tackle them with force if they do not surrender or do not leave our territory.” — Guardian Unlimited Â