CIA Wrong on Iraq 'Mobile Labs,' Powell Says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was wrong about Iraq's purported pre-war mobile biological weapons laboratories, a key part of the case about suspected weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday.

"I'm very concerned," he said in reply to a question on the NBC program "Meet the Press" about having used claims in a U.N. Security Council speech now known to have been "inaccurate and discredited."

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AND THIS IS WHERE THAT INACCURATE AND DISCREDITED INFORMATION TOOK US

New York Times Sunday May 16

The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment. Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.
``In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,'' Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Secretary of State Colin Powell ``hit the roof'' when he read the memo, according to the account.


Former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said it was a major miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically designed to extract information from al-Qaida prisoners to Abu Ghraib and other holding centers inside Iraq.

The reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro said, were the frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information was being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration over the lack of information about the resistance in Iraq.


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Prisoner-Abuse.html