Colin Powell likely was mistaken when he labelled a shabby military compound in Iraq a 'poison factory' , says a British reporter who just visited the compound.

In the Sunday London Observer, Luke Harding reports from the terrorist camp in northern Iraq named by Colin Powell as a centre of the al-Qaeda international network.

If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise. The US Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq - run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam - as a 'terrorist chemicals and poisons factory.' Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind - more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere - only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.

Harding acknowledges there was a sophisticated television studio and computers in the compound and that the group is a violent bunch, having killed more than 800 opposition Kurdish fighters and failing in an assassination attempt of the Prime Minister of a neighboring town.

Giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the camp has been dismantled since he received his information. On the other hand, maybe he purposefully was fed disinformation. Either way, it doesn't strike us as either a "smoking gun" or even reliable evidence that this outdated, out of the way compound poses any great threat to America.

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