WASHINGTON (AFP) - US administration officials chose to ignore a CIA officer's warnings that an Iraqi defector's claims of purported biological labs made by Iraq for germ warfare were unproven.
Sunday's edition of The Washington Post quoted veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller who, it said, "recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar.
"The CIA officer took his pen," he recounted in an interview, "and crossed out the whole paragraph" in a statement to be presented by then secretary of state Colin Powell to the United Nations.
"A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the UN Security Council on February 5 (2003) and said: 'We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.'"
Drumheller was stunned, the newspaper reported.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," it quoted the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring
2006-06-25
10:43:12
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