US: The former US State Department chief of intelligence has accused Secretary of State Colin Powell of misleading the world in his UN speech in February, writes Conor O'Clery.
Mr Greg Thielmann, who had responsibility for analysing the weapons threat posed by Saddam Hussein, said that intelligence was misrepresented and the public deceived.
At the time of Mr Powell's February 5th presentation to the UN security council of the case against Iraq, Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent threat to anyone "not even its own neighbors", Mr Thielmann told the CBS programme 60 Minutes last night.
"I think my conclusion now is that it's probably one of the low points in his long distinguished service to the nation," he said of Mr Powell.
In his 80-minute UN presentation Mr Powell used intercepted conversations, satellite maps and slides to show that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and deceiving UN weapons inspectors.
Many items of intelligence he listed have since been discredited or unproven, including hidden chemical bunkers, aluminium tubes for use in a nuclear weapons programme, mobile chemical and biological weapons labs and links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Mr Thielmann said he believed the decision to go to war was made first and then the intelligence was interpreted to fit that conclusion.
"The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence," said Mr Thielmann, who left as director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in September last year.
"They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.
"I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials."
Mr Thielmann said the State Department's intelligence reports were ignored or sanded down to suit the White House's case. "They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it fit their overall interpretation."
On the same programme a UN weapons inspector, Mr Steve Allinson, said he and a dozen other UN inspectors in Iraq laughed at various points as they watched the speech, "because the information he was presenting was just, you know, didn't mean anything, had no meaning".
Their conclusion after the speech he said was: "They have nothing."