Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is now saying neither he nor his aides believed Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat before the US-led invasion. In an interview with journalist Robert Scheer, Powell said the President was convinced by nuclear claims given to him by Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA. Powell said: “The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote.” Asked about President Bush’s faulty claim that Saddam Hussein attempted to buy nuclear material from Niger in his State of the Union speech, Powell reportedly answered: “It should never have been in the speech… I never believed it.”