Al-Libi’s Tall Tales
A CIA document obtained by NEWSWEEK provides further evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had serious doubts about information from a high-level Qaeda detainee before the Iraq war

Nov. 10, 2005 - A CIA document shows the agency in January 2003 raised questions about an Al Qaeda detainee’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s government provided chemical and biological weapons training to terrorists—weeks before President George W. Bush and other top officials flatly used those same claims to make their case for war against Iraq...

...The new documents also raise the possibility that caveats raised by intelligence analysts about al-Libi’s claims were withheld from Powell when he was preparing his Security Council speech. Larry Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff and oversaw the vetting of Powell’s speech, responded to an e-mail from NEWSWEEK Wednesday stating that he was unaware of the DIA doubts about al-Libi at the time the speech was being prepared. “We never got any dissent with respect to those lines you cite … indeed the entire section that now we know came from [al-Libi],” Wilkerson wrote...http://tinyurl.com/c35ba
*