Throwing a Curveball

[andyfox]

In a long article in today's L.A. Times, German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected WMDs say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's BND (Federal Intelligence Service) said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so. They say President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Secretary of State Colin Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003. Powell used a drawing to show the Security Council that Iraq had a mobile weapons lab, not photos. How could he do otherwise?

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand, and impossible to confirm. They also said that he suffered from emotional and mental problems.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons. The White House ignored evidence gathered by UN weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. The administration issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

The CIA, for its part, embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or even interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied, and refused to admit the error until May 2004.

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell at the UN. "We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! we had always told them it was not proven. It was not hard intelligence."

CIA officials now concede that Curveball fused fact, research he gleaned from the Internet, and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip." U.S. and German officials feared that Curveball was coached to lie by Ahmad Chalabi. Of three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's lies, two had ties to Chalabi and all three turned out to be frauds.

The case for the Iraq war also looks like it has turned out to be a fraud.