Testifying before a parliamentary inquiry yesterday, British Secret Intelligence Service Director Richard Dearlove defended a September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to the New York Times (see GSN, Sept. 15).

Dearlove said that he and the intelligence service had had “full visibility of the process of preparing the dossier and that the whole process had gone extremely well.”

Dearlove also specifically defended a claim made in the dossier that the Iraqi military could deploy biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes, calling it “a piece of well-sourced intelligence” (Warren Hoge, New York Times, Sept. 16).

“It did come from an established and reliable source equating a senior Iraqi military officer who was certainly in a position to know this information,” Dearlove said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Sept. 16).

Dearlove told the inquiry that he believed there had been a “misinterpretation” in the way the 45-minute claim had been presented, according to the New York Times.  Previous intelligence indicated that the claim referred to only short-range weapons, he said (Hoge, New York Times).

“The original report referred … to battlefield weapons,” Dearlove said.  ‘I think what subsequently happened in the reporting was that it was taken that the 45 minutes applied … to weapons of a longer range,” he said (Reuters/Washington Post, Sept. 16).

Powell Visits Site of 1988 Iraqi Chemical Weapons Attack

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday visited the northern Iraqi city of Halabja — the site of a 1998 chemical weapons attack by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime that killed 5,000 people.

“What can I say to you?”  Powell told an assembled crowd.  “I cannot tell you that choking mothers died holding their choking babies to their chests.  You know that,” he said.

“I cannot tell you that the world should have acted sooner.  You know that.  What I can tell you is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again,” Powell said (Steven Weisman, New York Times, Sept. 16).

Powell also said the 1988 attack demonstrated that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and the will to use such weapons.

“If you want evidence of the existence and the use of weapons of mass destruction, come here now to Halabja today and see it,” Powell said.  “What happened over the intervening 15 years?  Did (Hussein) suddenly lose the motivation?  Did he suddenly decide that such weapons would not be useful?  The international community did not believe so,” he added.

Barham Salih, prime minister for the western section of Iraq’s Kurdish region, said the Halabja attack justified the U.S. effort to overthrow Hussein.

“Today it is perplexing and rather painful indeed for the people of Halabja to hear voices in the international community that continue to insist on proof for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction,” Salih said.  “Here is the proof.  Halabja is the proof. … This mass grave in Halabja and the other 170 so far discovered mass graves in Iraq should dispel any doubts about the legitimacy of the American and British liberation of Iraq.  These mass graves vindicate the moral imperative of your intervention to protect the people of Iraq,” Salih said (Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, Sept. 16).

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