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U.S. Commission on Prewar Iraq Intelligence Meets
The bipartisan presidential commission created earlier this year to examine U.S. intelligence on prewar Iraq held its first meeting yesterday, according to the Associated Press (see GSN, April 2). During the closed meeting, the commission heard from about a dozen experts, including former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay, current and former members of the Iraq Survey Group and members of the National Intelligence Council, AP reported. The meeting focused on Iraq, but the commission’s work will include studying threats posed by terrorist groups and other countries, the commission’s chairmen, former Senator Chuck Robb (D-Va.) and U.S. Court of Appeals senior judge Laurence Silberman, said in a statement. The commission is expected to meet again today to hear testimony from about a dozen additional experts, commission spokesman Larry McQuillan said (Katherine Pfleger Shrader, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, May 27). Meanwhile, a book by British journalist John Kampfner says that British Prime Minister Tony Blair sought to block the United States from conducting an inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq because Blair was in “denial” over the issue, according to the London Guardian. According to Blair’s Wars, the prime minister’s senior foreign affairs adviser, Nigel Sheinwald, contacted U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in late January to discuss whether the United States would conduct an inquiry. Rice told Sheinwald at that time that while the United States was considering the proposal, no decision had yet been made. “The British were miffed that the Americans had not bothered to tell them,” Kampfner wrote. During a second call to Rice on Feb. 1, according to the book, Sheinwald sought to persuade her to reject the inquiry, but was rebuffed. “You have your politics, we have ours,” Rice told Sheinwald, according to the book (Nicholas Watt, London Guardian, May 27). In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that U.S. investigators have been unable to find the Iraqi officers whose recorded voices were featured in Powell’s February 2003 briefing to the U.N. Security Council. During his presentation, Powell played recordings, obtained through intercepted telephone conversations, of men identified as Iraqi military officers seemingly discussing ways to hide WMD stockpiles from U.N. inspectors. In one recording, a man identified as a captain told a colonel to “remove ... the expression ... ‘nerve agents’” when found in “wireless instructions,” the Sun reported. Powell said yesterday that the tapes were authentic. “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 (Mark Matthews, Baltimore Sun, May 27).
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