AMERICA: The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council last year, when making the case for war against Iraq, that four sources had given US intelligence "detailed and accurate" descriptions of mobile labs to make biological weapons.
Mr Powell has now conceded for the first time that the intelligence was not "solid", just a few days after the Los Angeles Times revealed it mostly came from one suspect source nicknamed "Curveball", who was linked with former Iraqi exile Mr Ahmad Chalabi.
"We know what the fermenters look like, we know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like, we know how they fit together," Mr Powell said in his February 5th, 2003, presentation to the UN on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories, perhaps 18 trucks," Mr Powell claimed, citing a chemical engineer defector and three other sources.
Mr Powell told US reporters on a plane carrying him back to the US after a meeting of NATO in Brussels recently that he was given flawed data.
"I looked at the four elements that they gave me for that one, and they stood behind them," he said. "It appears not to be the case that it was that solid."
Mr Powell's presentation to the Security Council was the central element in his appeal for a resolution directly supporting a US-led invasion of Iraq. The US failed to convince council members but, given Mr Powell's prestige at home, it did much to bolster domestic support for war.
The Los Angeles Times disclosed last Sunday that US officials suspected that the defector named Curveball was coached to supply false information.
Mr Powell told reporters that he had pressed intelligence officials before addressing the Security Council to make sure their analysis from four alleged sources was correct.
The evidence about the mobile labs was "the most dramatic" of the evidence he offered the UN, and "I made sure it was multisourced".
Now that he had determined it was not "solid", he had had "discussions" with the CIA, he said, without giving details.
The Los Angeles Times said that former chief weapons inspector, Mr David Kay, had established that Curveball, whose name was not known to the CIA until after the war, was the brother of a top aide to Mr Ahmad Chalabi.
Mr Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, was supported by senior Pentagon officials when lobbying Washington for an invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam.
Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN yesterday that "there is a preponderance of evidence that these mobile weapons labs did not exist".
Senator Carl Levin, the deputy chairman of the committee, said the flaws in pre-war intelligence were "very embarrassing" to the US.
He also criticised the vice-president, Mr Dick Cheney, for claiming just a few weeks ago that two suspect trucks found in northern Iraq were proof of weapons of mass destruction.