October 17, 2003	Friday	Sha'aban 20, 1424

WASHINGTON, Oct 16: US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday dismissed fresh allegations from a former State Department official who charged that portions of the secretary’s Iraq testimony to the United Nations earlier this year were based on faulty intelligence.

Mr Powell called “nonsense” claims from Greg Thielmann, a retired analyst at the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, that he exaggerated Saddam Hussein’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons capacity.

“I presented the considered judgment of the intelligence community — the coordinated judgment of the intelligence community of the United States of America. And some of the information I presented has already been validated by David Kay,” he said.

Mr Kay heads the 1,400-strong team of US weapon inspectors in Iraq who reported earlier this month that they found no weapons of mass destruction in that country.

But Mr Powell said that “investigation (to determine whether Iraq had or was making such weapons) continues.”

Mr Thielmann appeared on Wednesday on the CBS programme “60 Minutes II” and said that Mr Powell’s UN testimony was “probably one of the low points in his long distinguished service to the nation.”

“They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show,” said Mr Thielmann. “They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.” As a result, he said, Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to anyone just before the US invasion — despite Mr Powell’s speech to the United Nations to the contrary.

Speaking before the United Nations on Feb 5, Mr Powell presented wide-ranging evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programme and links to Al Qaeda. For example, Mr. Powell presented satellite photographs that he said were facilities used to manufacture chemical weapons. He also presented diagrams, as relayed by defectors, of mobile labs capable of producing biological toxins. After the war, US soldiers found what they claimed to be such labs, but they had been scrubbed clean, according to the Bush administration.

Mr Powell told reporters on Wednesday that at no point in his presentation did he use the phrase “imminent threat.”

“I don’t think I used the word ‘imminent’ in my presentation on the 5th of February. I presented, on the 5th of February, not something I pulled out of the air.”

A senior State Department official that Mr Thielmann, who resigned from the State Department over a year ago, at no point briefed Mr Powell on the intelligence estimate. “Mr Thielmann was three levels down,” this official said. He added that every piece of intelligence in Mr Powell’s Feb 5 presentation was based on at least two different kinds of sources. “For example, if we had an intercept we would double check that with a transcript of a defector,” the official said.