US gets thrown a Curveball
 

At the same time this report is being released, news reports based on information released by Diane Fieinstein, a democrat on the panel who says the report is a whitewash, seems to throw grave doubt on the reports' claim that Bush admin officials were not pressuing the CIA to come up with bogus info to justify the war. The Republicans, of course really stepped up to the plate on this issue, by delaying release of a separate report on whether the admisatration pressured the CIA, til after the election. I wonder why. It would seem to me that if that report said there was no pressure, they would release it now. So it seems when these two reports are released in there entirerty, one may contradict the other. Nothing new from the Repblicans.


Curveball
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent

NewsweekJuly 19 issue - The more he read, the more uneasy he became. In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover."


After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to speak up, according to a devastating report from the Senate intelligence committee, released last week, on intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war. He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

The saga of Curve Ball is just one of many wince-inducing moments to be found in the 500-page Senate report, which lays out how the U.S. intelligence community utterly failed to accurately assess the state of Saddam Hussein's programs for weapons of mass destruction—and how White House and Pentagon officials, intent on taking the country to war, unquestioningly embraced the flawed conclusions. In startling detail, the bipartisan report concludes that the CIA and other agencies consistently "overstated" the evidence that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was actively reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. Hampered by a "group think" dynamic that caused them to view all Iraqi actions in the harshest possible light, the committee found, U.S. intelligence officials repeatedly embellished fragmentary and ambiguous pieces of evidence, making the danger posed by Iraq appear far more urgent than it actually was.

When U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq in the fall of 2002 and reported that they couldn't find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for instance, the CIA dismissed the inspectors as gullible neophytes who were being tricked by deceitful Iraqi handlers. Similarly, when several Iraqi officials and scientists stepped forward to claim that Saddam had actually destroyed his WMD stockpiles and discontinued his programs (a claim that appears increasingly likely to have been the truth), they were branded as liars—while dubious sources like Curve Ball, whose stories were in step with the administration, were embraced.


Taken together, the facts in the report show that virtually every major claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq—from Saddam's growing nuclear program to his close ties with Al Qaeda—was either wrong or exaggerated. The CIA was so convinced that Saddam was seeking to rebuild nuclear weapons that it "lost objectivity," the report concludes. The —problem was compounded by the fact that the CIA did not have a single human spy inside Iraq after 1998 to report on what was really going on in Saddam's weapons program. Why not? The agency apparently didn't want to take the risk. "It's very hard to sustain... it takes a rare officer who can go in... and survive scrutiny for a long time," the agency told the panel, which cited the responses as evidence of the "risk averse" corporate culture of the CIA. "Leading up to September 11, our government didn't connect the dots," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the committee. "In Iraq we are even more culpable, because the dots themselves never existed."

The report did offer the administration one consolation: the investigators said they found no overt evidence that intelligence-community officials were directly pressured to distort their findings. Seizing on that conclusion, White House aides tried to make the best of the damaging report, saying it proved that the president had been given bad information. "Listen, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the U.N. thought so," Bush told an audience last week. The president showed no signs of having had any second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion.

Other Republicans weren't so sure. Asked whether Congress would have authorized an invasion had it known two years ago what it knows now, Senate intelligence-committee chairman Pat Roberts, a loyal White House ally, said bluntly, "I don't know." He himself might have voted for a war more "like Bosnia and Kosovo"—a bombing campaign where no U.S. ground troops were put in harm's way.

Though the Republican-led committee officially concluded that nobody ordered intelligence analysts to tailor their findings, the question of whether political pressure influenced intelligence decisions leading up to the war has yet to be laid to rest. There were repeated clashes between committee Democrats and Republicans on the issue. Some Democrats on the committee complained that the report gives an incomplete and inaccurate picture of what really happened, since Republicans insisted on taking up the damaging topic of pressure in a second report—to be issued after the presidential election.

The report itself points to examples of possible political meddling, especially on the issue of whether Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda. Some U.S. intelligence analysts complained to the CIA ombudsman that "the constant questions and requests to reexamine the issue of Iraq's links to terrorism [were] unreasonable and took away from their valuable analytic time." When the CIA reached a measured and ambiguous view of the connection—"Iraq and Al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship" was the title of one June 2002 report—a team of Pentagon hard-liners under the direction of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith strongly challenged the agency's conclusions. An August 2002 briefing that the Pentagon team gave to the then CIA Director George Tenet pushed evidence that Iraq might have been involved in the 9/11 attack. Their prime piece of evidence: alleged meetings in Prague between lead hijacker Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. In fact, the committee found that the meetings likely never occurred. The Pentagon team brandished a photo of a supposed October 1999 meeting between Atta and the Iraqi agent that turned out to be bogus. The Qaeda terrorist was actually in Egypt visiting his family when the rendezvous supposedly took place. Tenet "didn't think much of" the briefing, he told committee investigators, so the Pentagon team took its case to Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and Stephen Hadley, the deputy national-security adviser. There they found a much more receptive audience. Libby asked for follow-up, including "a chronology of Atta's travels."

The committee report may be just the beginning of the president's political troubles this month. Next up is the long-awaited 9-11 Commission report, which is expected to be highly critical of administration agencies for failing to "connect the dots" that might have prevented the terror attacks. NEWSWEEK has learned that the commission has decided to release its findings next week, so they don't coincide with the Democratic Party convention in Boston at the end of the month. Commission officials say they don't want their work to get caught up in the politics of the presidential campaign. It was a nice thought, anyway.

I'll tell you what I see. We had on one hand, the UN Iraq Survey Group, who had been in Iraq since 1991, staffed with scientists premier in there field with advanced graduate degrees by the bucket, with a budget of millions, telling us that Saddam had no WMDs, and if he did have them they were so hidden they were no danger to anyone because they were not deployed. They also found no industrial infrastructure to produce those weaspons, and an army in such poor shape it couldn't deliver the weapons anyway.

On the other hand we have a hopeless drunk, supplied by Armand Chalabi, who is simply saying what Bush wants to hear, and an analyst directly telling the Secretary of State the guy is a drunken liar. Well, of course, Bush's team, being the great strategists and geniuses you portray them to be, decided the drunken lush had more credibility than the Iraq survey Group, and sent thousands of people to their deaths based on this brilliant decision.

Damn fools. You want to support these people, thats who you are supporting, damn fools who have no right running this nation.

Look at how pointless this whole argument is getting. For months you all argued we had some reason to invade these guys in the first place. For months we said the US has a big army in the wrong place, and that going after Iraq was simply a pet project of the Bush's that we shouldn't be doing until we were done in Afganistan. Now look where we are - you all are grasping at straws to try to find even a shred of justification left for this fiasco, while the news screams about a possible al-Queda attack on Wall St. If it wasn't so sad that there will probably be thousands of people killed in this country because of the utterly stupid policies of this admisastration, it would be a comic farce.

People who love this country should be calling for an immediate transfer of these troops to Afganistan, and we should turn whats left of Iraq over to the Arab League. This idiotic idea that we should be spending billions there that we need to actually fight the War on Terrorism, a war this admisastration has sent to hell in a hand basket is criminal and should be grounds for impeachment. The President is violating his constitutional oath to perserve and protect this country - instead, as we go unprotected, he perserves and protects Iraq. This is rapidly reaching the point of national insantity we have not seen since the 60s.

That was a straw, and I've never seen one so well grasped.

Posted by Botnst: Well, you're wrong.

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You forgot to preface that with, "In my opinion. . ."

Joe B.

He couldn't handle those fancy words.

Bot,

Do you really believe the last half of this quote?:

"This is much worse then the prison abuse thingy, which was likely a failure of local command."

That was a policy from Rumsfeld. Now maybe he didn't envision what happened, exactly, but his policy was not implemented with sufficient control and training to ensure whatever he wanted to happen, specifically, did happen instead of what did happen. I think brushing that off as a local command failure is way too generous. One of those unsolicited, and unwarranted excuses you make for the Bush Administration's shortcomings that makes it seem like you really have to be a supporter. No matter what exactly they do. Jim

Curveball story gets legs
 

Pentagon's prewar intelligence role questioned
Roberts criticizes reliance on single, 'troubled' source
Sunday, July 11, 2004 Posted: 9:18 PM EDT (0118 GMT)



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday that they want to know whether the Pentagon knowingly withheld information from the CIA and ran a secret intelligence-gathering operation in building a case for invading Iraq.

Their comments came two days after the committee released an independent, bipartisan report condemning flawed prewar intelligence that said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. (Full story)

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the committee's chairman and vice chairman, Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, respectively, expressed concern over actions by the Defense Intelligence Agency and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

Roberts cited false information on Iraq that the Bush administration had taken from a source code-named Curveball.

"Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon," Roberts said.

"Yet the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, knew of his background. He has a very troubled background."

Based on this source's claims, the administration argued that Iraq had biological weapons capability, Roberts said.

"That's the kind of flaw in intelligence and I think -- I won't say willful -- but the DIA should have shared that information with the CIA. And the CIA should have gone from there."

In fact, Roberts said, much information about Curveball was redacted, or blacked out, from the version of the report that was made public.

"I can't really tell you some of the more specific details that would make your eyebrows even raise higher," Roberts said.

Rockefeller questioned whether Feith overstepped legal bounds with a unit he oversaw, the Office of Special Plans, created to analyze intelligence.

"There's always the question whether or not he was running a secret intelligence operation that bypassed the entire intelligence community. And the law says you've got to inform the intelligence community of anything that you're doing," Rockefeller said.

The allegation is contained in a supplement to the 511-page report.

A Pentagon spokeswoman contacted by CNN had no response to the comments.

The Pentagon has argued that the Office of Special Plans did not gather intelligence but rather assessed existing intelligence.

The Bush administration and Pentagon officials have denied any wrongdoing and stand by the decision to go to war.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has also said the department's sources helped provide valuable intelligence.

Rockefeller acknowledged receiving a letter from the Defense Department accusing him of unfairly charging Feith with unlawful conduct.

"Let's find out if there is" wrongdoing, Rockefeller said. "I don't know."

Speaking to reporters after the NBC program, Roberts said, "We are taking a look at the use of intelligence, and we're taking a look at the role the Defense Department played, and we're looking at prewar Iraq ... in a careful and deliberate way, because we want to get it right."

On ABC's "This Week," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said questions about the role of the Defense Department are significant in determining how to strengthen the nation's intelligence network.

"The Department of Defense controls the majority of the money and the agencies," she said.

If the CIA director "can't move the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, can't set strategy, can't bring the subtleties of a judgment to the decision makers, then you've got to change the structure," said Feinstein, an Intelligence Committee member.

CNN's Barbara Starr contributed to this report