Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday defended the Bush administration's position that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programs and defended his speech on the matter to the United Nations last February. "This game is still unfolding," he told reporters.
He was responding to a study that found Iraq had ended its programs by the mid-1990s and did not pose an immediate threat to the United States before the 2003 war. Powell said he had not read the report but read news reports about it. The study, released Thursday, was conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan, respected group that opposed the war in Iraq.
The United States used the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a justification for launching the war against the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to the report. The report follows a nine-month search in Iraq for WMD -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- the key reason the administration cited in its decision to invade Iraq.
In this article, CNN shortened Secretary Powell's "That's a fact" statement, extended here: "The fact of the matter is Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and programs for weapons of mass destruction and used weapons of mass destruction against Iran and against their own people. That's a fact," he added.
The secretary of state also said that his presentation to the United Nations last year made it clear that "we had seen some links and connections" between Iraq and terror groups "over time." "I have not seen smoking gun concrete evidence about the connection, but I think the possibility of some connections did exist and was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
"We found nothing," the Canegie Study author Joseph Cirincione said. "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."