The Bush administration’s prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents. In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said “firsthand descriptions” of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come from an Iraqi chemical engineer who had defected and is “currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him.” The claims about the mobile facilities remain unverified, however, and now U.S. officials are trying to get access to the Iraqi engineer to verify his story, the sources said, particularly because intelligence officials have discovered that he is related to a senior official in Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who actively encouraged the United States to invade Iraq. Full Story
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