Curveball (aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi) told The Guardian yesterday that nearly everything he told German intelligence was a lie.
Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy - one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell's presentation revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot. Something else left him even more amazed; until that point he had not met a US official, let alone been interviewed by one.
"I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he told the Guardian...
Recall back to 2003, the Bush administration gleefully used Curveball's lies to justify their war ambitions in Iraq. Most infamously, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell used Curveball's stories as a key point in his presentation to the United Nations.
"We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels," Powell said. "The source was an eyewitness — an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died."
The effect at the UN was dramatic. Here was a detailed first-hand account from an insider of the sinister and deceptive inner workings of Saddam's regime. It was tangible evidence; far more compelling than the other two elements of Powell's case for war, which seemed scant in detail and unlikely to persuade the invasion's naysayers.
In fact, it wasn't evidence at all. These were fantasies dreamt up by a man who had similar goals as Dick Cheney, and other neocons in the George W. Bush administration — cooking up reasons — fixing the 'intelligence' — to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power.
"Even now, Curveball seems bemused that his lies got as far as they did," The Guardian reported. I think the same can be written of the members of the Bush administration too.
Today The Guardian reports that Powell is trying to shift the responsibility of his statements at the UN to CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Powell said that both the CIA and DIA should face questions about why they failed to sound the alarm about Janabi. He demanded to know why it had not been made clear to him that Curveball was totally unreliable before false information was put into the key intelligence assessment, or NIE, put before Congress, into the president's state of the union address two months before the war and into his own speech to the UN.
"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," he told the Guardian . "The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN."
But, Curveball's statements were known to be false by the Germans and U.S. intelligence community as early as 2000. He said:
"The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories. For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it. Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me."
While deflecting the blame onto the intelligence community is typical of members of the Bush administration, the former Secretary of State should be demanding accountability from his former boss and the former vice president. The so-called 'intelligence' that he and others used to justify the war was "fixed" on the behest of Dick Cheney and other high ranking members of the administration. Bush, Cheney, and others in the administration used Curveball's lies on Iraq because they were in sync with their own lies on Iraq.
As early as June of 2003, there were reports in the Washington Post and other newspapers that some of the Iraq analysts were pressured by Cheney and other high-ranking officials.
Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda, creating an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives, according to senior intelligence officials.
With Cheney taking the lead in the administration last August in advocating military action against Iraq by claiming it had weapons of mass destruction, the visits by the vice president and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, "sent signals, intended or otherwise, that a certain output was desired from here," one senior agency official said...
Government sources said CIA analysts were not the only ones who felt pressure from their superiors to support public statements by Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others about the threat posed by Hussein.
The White House created the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon in 2001 to "fix" the intelligence on Iraq and fabricate justifications for war. Seymour Hersh wrote in 2003 in The New Yorker on this office:
They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal — a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question...
According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.
The purpose of "the Cabal" was to fix the 'intelligence' on Iraq and gin up public support for a war with Iraq.
The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence."
The Bush administration was repeatedly warned by the CIA and the DIA throughout 2002 that "its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored."
"I know of no pressure... I know of nobody who pressured anybody," Douglas Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was quoted by the Post as telling reporters at the time. This is 180 degrees opposite of what Hersh reported:
W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”
While the established U.S. intelligence community was being abused by the administration's warmongers, Feith, himself, was busy fixing 'intelligence' to fit Cheney's war vision. On orders from Cheney, Feith forged a letter from Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, that stated Mohammad Atta, the leader of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, trained for the mission in Iraq.
This part of the big lie helped the administration convince many Americans into falsely believing there was a link between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein, despite the U.S. intelligence community was saying publicly and telling the administration there was no link.
Cheney, not the U.S. intelligence community, was central in establishing the big lies that led to Iraq. For example, in a September 2003 interview, Cheney said:
there was "a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s... al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained... the Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organisation."
It was "clearly official policy" on the part of Iraq, he said.
Documents released last year in the National Security Archives, show that the Bush administration long had planned for a war with Iraq even before the September 11, 2001 attacks. This matches what former-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote in his book about the Bush administration's early Iraq war plans.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the cherry-picked intelligence from "the Cabal" to back his lies, or as he now spins them as "misstatements" over weapons of mass destruction. But, he like Powell, continues to blame the CIA rather than the Bush administration's own 'intelligence' fixing efforts. Rumsfeld dissembles in his book that people that have accused him and others in the Bush administration of lying were using "a small string of comments – ill-chosen or otherwise deficient – to try to depict the administration as purposefully misrepresenting the intelligence."
So, Powell may wish to deflect responsibility to the CIA and DIA and away from himself, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others in administration, and point the blame to nameless agencies like the CIA and DIA. No matter that the CIA and DIA were pressured to give the Bush administration the 'intelligence' the wanted and when "alarms" were sounded, "the Cabal" had them fixed.
No, instead of questioning nameless agencies, America must question under oath men (and women) like Powell about how precisely and why did the Bush administration conspire to fix the 'intelligence' and use it to falsely lead the United States into war with Iraq.