Just when you thought that the Bush administration case for invading Iraq could not be discredited any further, another bombshell drops.
Perhaps the most over-hyped unconventional threat used to justify the invasion of Iraq involved alleged mobile bioweapons labs in trucks and trailers that Saddam Hussein was said to be hiding from UNMOVIC inspectors. This bombshell vaporizes any remnant shards of US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s propaganda effort before the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 because the “defector” who delivered the “intelligence” on this supposed threat was “an out-and-out fabricator”.
Curveball
The Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday March 28 that the administration’s handpicked weapons seeker, David Kay, now says that reliance on this source, codenamed “Curveball”, for a crucial piece of the case against Iraq was a troubling failure.
“This is the one that’s damning”, Kay said.
(See this summary of the story or this full wire service version if you do not wish to register at the LA Times.)
Deep Blade’s interpretation of this story says that it is silliness to think that the administration and US intelligence services somehow were duped into relying on someone named Curveball for weapons-threat information to back the most consequential foreign policy decision a nation can make. No one was duped–but senior officials knowingly used the false information in order to obtain political consent to take Iraq. And the loss of lives, treasure, and apparently permanent feeding of lives and treasure to the project certainly are the major consequences.
In fact, an amazing aspect of the Curveball story is how questions about credibility were raised all along. German intelligence apparently waved red flags sometime between Powell’s February presentation and early spring of last year. Beyond that, the three persons Powell said corroborated Curveball’s intelligence all had been debriefed some time ago and found to have no firsthand knowledge. In one of the cases Defense Intelligence had concluded the defector probably was coached by Ahmed Chalabi’s exile group, earning him in 2002 a “fabrication notice” on a classified computer network run by US intelligence. And Curveball himself turns out to be the brother of one of Chalabi’s top aides!
So Curveball is a sick joke. The danger Saddam posed to America was zero and Deep Blade believes the most important policymakers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, and Powell knew it–from the very beginning. Curveball simply performed the fabrication of the data that the Pentagon lie factory known as the Office of Special Plans required in order to drag the coalition of the willing into the colonial adventure in Iraq while scaring the US public into consent.
Pre-invasion lying about the mobile bioweapons labs
So why are the Curveball revelations so damning? We must try to recall how media cooperated with Powell and others in disseminating the scary hype from the lie factory. Suggestions that Iraq was building, using, and hiding mobile bioweapons labs went back more than ten years to the initial inspection process that following the first Gulf War. The LA Times story explains how Curveball appeared through German intelligence after the Pentagon’s favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, was asked to participate in examining a theoretical question about mobile weapons labs.
Fast forward to November 2002. UNSCR 1441 had passed and the new UN inspection regime was about to engage Iraq. Media stories began to appear about “Hell on Wheels” and “Winnebagos of Death”. ABC News was typical when it reported that “Saddam Hussein may still have the means to kill thousands of people hidden among the fleets of motor vehicles across his country”.
Powell’s UN testimony was the culmination:
“One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.
“Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.
“The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.
“Although Iraq’s mobile production program began in the mid-1990s, UN inspectors at the time only had vague hints of such programs. Confirmation came later, in the year 2000. The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs….
Emphasis was added above to show how Powell communicated the certainty of his information. There just was not any doubt about the scary amount of “biological poison” Powell assured us that Iraq could produce.
Conscious pre-invasion cherry picking means recent statements are disingenuous
But even at the time, Powell must have at least suspected what he was saying was shaky. On this matter, the March 28 LA Times story reinforces what The Guardian reported in May 2003–Powell expressed “serious doubts about the reliability of intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons programme”.
And what is now called “cherry picking” must have been happening, because, as the LA Times story reports, “‘CIA files showed that another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, specifically denied that they had worked on such facilities’, [David] Kay said. Powell did not cite that defector“.
This cherry picking–separating and using only that intelligence that seemed to support a major Iraqi threat, no matter how shaky it was known to be–suggests conscious choices were made by Powell and other pro-attack spokespeople to use worthless intelligence only because it advanced the case for an attack.
The sincerity of statements that Powell has been making since the beginning of 2004 about the pre-war case and subsequent failure to find unconventional weapons therefore must be called into question.
For example, Powell said in an interview on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Kopple (Jan.07.2004), “…the intelligence community, to this day, stands behind the judgments that were made and that were presented to the world, presented to the Congress and presented to the American people through the national intelligence estimate, and that I presented before the Security Council”.
Or more recently in an interview on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos (Mar.14.2004), “And so we may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer. But let’s not suggest that somehow we knew this. We went to the United Nations, we went to the world with the best information we had, nothing that was cooked. I spent a great deal of time out at the CIA with Director Tenet and Deputy Director John McLaughlin and all of their experts going over that presentation, and it reflected the view of the intelligence community, the United Kingdom’s intelligence community, the intelligence community of many other nations, and it was consistent with reporting from the United Nations over time.
“And so we had a solid basis for the information we presented to the President, the intelligence community presented to the President and for the decisions that the President made”.
The Curveball story says that these statements by Colin Powell are wholly disingenuous. There was no solid basis, but Powell could not reveal any doubts. In another quote from the LA Times story, David Kay clearly explains the consequences for the rush to war if Powell had told the truth. Kay said, “If Powell had said to the Security Council: ‘It’s one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don’t know his name,’ as he’s describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court.”
Post-invasion lying about the mobile bioweapons labs
If the truthfulness of the justifications for taking Iraq were highly dubious before the invasion, the unconventional weapons story continued to unfold afterward in an environment where an astonishing program of official propaganda received vigorous media cooperation in its dissemination.
By the time of the chaos immediately following the invasion of Iraq in early April 2003, German intelligence had behind the scenes informed US officials that it had “various problems” with Curveball. At the same time, the reactionary media created a whole program of tantalizing confirmations that the invasion was properly justified because mobile bioweapons trucks were being found. Here, a Fox News story from April 11, 2003 pants that “seven to 15 vehicles are being tested for possibly containing biological or chemical weapons and for serving as mobile weapons labs”.
A report called “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants” was released to the public on May 28, 2003 following the discovery of two semi-trailers that seemed to fit the description Powell gave earlier on February 5. The graphics in the report are Powell’s from February 5, along with photos claiming to show how the discovered trailers match up.
Then on May 29, 2003 President Bush closed the case in an interview on TVP, Poland:
“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them”.
Right at this time, allegations about “sexing up” of Iraq weapons intelligence exploded in the UK.
But here is how US media was reporting the mobile bioweapons lab story. This CNN item from June 7, 2003 lays out the proper framework for the uncritical American viewer:
“The CIA official, who has access to classified materials related to Iraq’s alleged biological weapons program, said a key Iraqi intelligence source who had worked on the design of the mobile labs and provided intelligence about the program to the CIA before the war was asked to identify the vehicles from a series of photographs. The Iraqi source identified the correct trucks as the mobile biological weapons laboratories that he had described to U.S. intelligence.
“Intelligence provided by that man was cited by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation of the U.S. case to the United Nations before the invasion of Iraq.
“‘The guy who designed it identified it’ for the CIA, the official said.
“‘They are designed to look like something else,’ he said, so Iraq could deny their function as biological weapons laboratories if they had been uncovered by U.N. inspectors. He said they were built on truck beds so they could be moved from locations likely to be inspected by the United Nations.
“Kay said he was aware of a number of theories that the vehicles might have had other uses, ‘none of which make any logical sense’.
“Kay saw one of the vehicles on a recent trip to Iraq and received reports on the second.
“Kay said most of the alternative uses that have been suggested ‘didn’t pass the laugh test’.
“‘The silliest one’, Kay said, was the suggestion that they had been designed to generate hydrogen for meteorological balloons”.
In a complete turnaround from what he rejected in June 2003, Kay now explains that the trailers “were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel”.
The Observer had reported on Sunday June 15, 2003 that “Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds… The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army’s original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control”.
(Another complete debunking of the mobile bioweapons lab theory was published June 5, 2003 by Traprock Peace Center. But, as author Mark F. McCarty laments, “Once again, the American media are acting as a servile conduit for the Bush administration’s propaganda. Even if subsequent reports completely annihilate the bioweapons lab theory, you can be sure that a sizeable portion of the American public will be left with the impression that these trailers constitute definitive proof that pre-invasion Iraq had an ongoing bioweapons program”.)
None of this stopped Powell from maintaining, with only a slight hedge, the fiction of the deadly bioweapons trucks. In this June 27, 2003 interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Powell still shows little doubt about the purpose of the trucks, though by now the whole case of Curveball’s prevarications must have been well known to him:
“Will we continue to look for more information to reinforce our opinion? Sure, we will. But I am confident with the judgment made by the CIA, and the reason I’m confident of that judgment is, we got this information through defectors and others. And when I presented it to the UN on the 5th of February, all I could show was a cartoon picture of what we thought it looked like based on what people said to us. And guess what? We found something that looked just like that. And nobody has been able to come up with an alternative use for this. But we’re still looking at it, but I’m fairly confident of the Director of Central Intelligence’s judgment.”
By October 2003, Powell is still peddling Curveball, though now the hedges are a little stronger after the null preliminary report given by David Kay. In an oped entitled What Kay Found, Powell on October 7, 2003 introduced the now-famous substitute for real weapons:
“WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002….
“The Kay Report also addresses the issue of suspected mobile biological agent laboratories: ‘Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant and BW [biological warfare] production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing . . . rules out their potential use in BW production.’ Here Kay’s findings are inconclusive. He is continuing to work this issue.”
In mid-January 2004, the only official still wanting to talk specifically about bioweapons trailers was Dick Cheney. Cheney said on January 22, 2004 that semi-trailers found in Iraq constitute “conclusive evidence” that Saddam Hussein “did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction”.
They took a country and no one will do a thing about it
Oh sure, the inquiries in the US and UK about misuse of the Iraq intelligence are ongoing. But the only punishment Bush, Blair, and their minions that would mean a damn thing–removal of the occupying troops and return of Iraq to its people–seems highly unlikely at this point.
The much ballyhooed “return of sovereignty” to the Iraqi people scheduled for July 1, 2004 appears to be nothing more than a sham process to create a “legalized” puppet government.
It saddens me deeply that I see no immediate way Bush and his band of international criminals can be held accountable for using lies about weapons to take colonial control of Iraq.
Wolfowitz argues reasons for going to war were valid despite not being “accurate”
Friday, March 19th, 2004In a March 18, 2004 interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS Newshour, Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz stuck to the “mistakes were made” line concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Jim Lehrer showed why his tough interviewing style strikes fear into the hearts of squirming public officials. In fairness, Lehrer did press Wolfowitz a little on remarks by President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland about “misleading” pre-war Iraq weapons claims, and the damage failure to find these weapons has done to US credibility.
Wolfowitz prevaricates on Iraq nuclear history
There was enough depth in this interview for an airing of past intelligence “mistakes” with respect to Iraq. Wolfowitz is known to despise former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. Here is how Wolfowitz turned the failures of the administration he serves around to land on top of Blix:
WOLFOWITZ: “…let’s take an example from I guess it’s 15 years ago before the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Iraq was supposed to have no nuclear weapons. They signed a nonproliferation treaty. The U.N. inspection agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program. They were wrong. They weren’t misleading the world. They just were wrong….
“Well, you know, the IAEA which Hans Blix headed at one period of time was an organization that gave a clean bill of health to Saddam Hussein when he was building nuclear weapons. I don’t think it’s very useful to go throwing around charges about credibility. I think what people need to help folks understand is that intelligence is not a science. Just because we can read license plates from space doesn’t mean that we can penetrate the minds of people”.
Then later, when Lehrer asked his most pointed question of the interview about reports that Wolfowitz ordered an investigation of Blix, Wolfowitz continues to disparage the IAEA of the early 1990s.
WOLFOWITZ: “…I asked the CIA a perfectly reasonable question which is: what should we infer from Hans Blix’s leadership of the IAEA when they failed to detect that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was in violation of the nonproliferation treaty? I think it’s a perfectly reasonable — it was a factual question. It wasn’t an investigation. I wasn’t interested in his background or anything that would discredit him personally. I was interested in knowing his competence as a nuclear weapons inspector. It was a perfectly normal, natural question. It was a question”.
Lehrer was ill-equipped to challenge the notions inherent in these remarks. Wolfowitz refers to a period in 1991 when the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) discovered extensive unreported nuclear activities undertaken in Iraq from the latter part of the 1980s right up to the US bombing and ground assault during the Gulf War in January and February of 1991.
Here is how the IAEA itself assessed this period for the United Nations Security Council in report S/1997/779 dated 8 October 1997 (Introduction paragraph 59):
“Despite Iraq’s prevarication, the IAEA carried out a comprehensive campaign of destruction, removal and rendering harmless of the practical assets of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear programme. This campaign involved the extensive destruction of buildings and equipment at the EMIS sites at Tuwaitha, Al Tarmiya and Al Sharqat, and at the nuclear weapons development and production sites at Al Atheer and Al Qa Qaa; of the laboratory-scale reprocessing facilities at Tuwaitha; and of gas centrifuge related materials, components and equipment. In total, more than 50,000 square metres of facility floor space were destroyed by explosives and more than 1,900 individual items and 600 tons of sensitive alloys, useful in a nuclear weapons programme or in uranium enrichment activities, were destroyed or rendered harmless”.
If you read through this whole report, and also the other periodic reports of Iraq weapons inspectors from 1991 through 1997, a story of extensive disarmament of Iraq emerges, even of its most closely guarded secret programs. So the IAEA had some catching up to do and then admirably performed a massive job in Iraq after the 1st Gulf War, starting with close to zero resources. Contrary to the Wolfowitz line, the IAEA was highly credible during this period.
The United States under Clinton, especially after 1997, and G. W. Bush, especially after 9/11, never wanted to recognize these accomplishments, preferring instead to construct a cartoon caricature Saddam with ambition for evil–a handy scare crow for a public wary of military adventure.
Gore gave pre-1991 Iraq nuclear details in 1992
But there is a big part of the pre-1991 Iraq nuclear story that is missing from the Wolfowitz recitation of current administration propaganda. He told Lehrer, “…before the Gulf War in 1991, our intelligence was wrong the other way. We didn’t know how big a nuclear program it turned out — we later found that he had”.
In fact, officials in the US government did know about the Iraqi nuclear program during the time international authorities were in the dark.
Let’s let Al Gore tell us all about it. In a campaign speech at The Center for National Policy on September 29, 1992, Gore explained how the G. H. W. Bush administration held detailed knowledge of and participated in supplying Iraq’s nuclear program.
GORE: “In April 1989, a nuclear proliferation expert from the Department of Energy reported intelligence indicators that Iraq had a crash program underway to build an atomic bomb. In June, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Iraq was running a major European network to procure military goods that were not supposed to be sold. In August, the FBI raided the Atlanta Branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and seized evidence of over $4 billion in illegal loans to Iraq, as well as use of about $2 billion of those funds to buy nuclear and other military technologies. And on September 22nd, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly wrote a memo acknowledging that money coming to Iraq through the Atlanta branch of the BNL did “appear to have been used” to finance acquisition of sensitive military technology. Also in September, the USDA reported kickbacks and possible diversions of US-supplied agricultural funds for military purposes.
“Most significant of all, in the same month, the CIA reported to Secretary of State James Baker and other top Bush administration officials that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology through a global network of front companies.
“Now, in the midst of this flood of highly alarming information, on October 2, 1989, President Bush signed a document known as NSD-26, which established policy toward Iraq under his Administration. This document is the benchmark for judging George Bush’s record for the direction of American policy toward Iraq in the period that would ultimately lead to war. We have only a partial idea of what is in that document, since the version that was finally released to Congress has been heavily censored. But the core statement of purpose and the fundamental assumptions behind it are clear. And so is the incredibly poor judgment of George Bush.
“NSD-26 mandated the pursuit of improved economic and political ties with Iraq on the assumption that Iraqi behavior could be modified by means of new favors to be granted”.
Wolfowitz depends on public delusion to ply his trade
The solid propaganda front in which Wolfowitz now participates depends on public ignorance and willingness to be deluded into continuing to accept the completely discredited administration story on weapons in Iraq from last year.
All of the “violations” Wolfowitz cites are moot if, as it appears, Iraq possessed no proscribed weapons at the time of the invasion:
“Iraq was in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. It was the 17th and supposed to be last resolution after 12 years of Iraq defying the United Nations. They did not comply with that. They lied in their declarations. They obstructed the inspectors….
“…Saddam Hussein was given a chance to come clean, he was given a chance to tell the world the truth and get rid of what he had, and he did not do that….
“…I know what I was told and it was the best judgments of our intelligence community at the time. Were they all accurate, no, they weren’t all accurate, but nobody was misleading anybody….
“The reason for going to war was because Iraq was in violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution….It is their support for terrorism, and it’s the oppression of their people and we had agreed in fact with Resolution 1441 to limit it to weapons of mass destruction and give them one last and final chance to come clean and he did not come clean”.
If Iraq had no weapons then the December 2002 declaration issued by Iraq was not a lie. They said they didn’t have the weapons! Wolfowitz admits this when he says intelligence judgments were not accurate. It was up to the UNMOVIC inspectors to determine the truth or untruth of those judgments. The right of the United States to decide and enforce consequences was not conveyed by UNSCR 1441. As explained in a previous post, war was not to be automatic.
It was the United States that grossly violated UNSCR 1441, and trashed international law while wearing its shredded tatters.
US accountability?
How will the world hold Wolfowitz and the rest of the Bush administration accountable for what clearly is aggression against Iraq? No amount of purported benevolence, imposition of American-style political organization, or market economic transformation in this colonial project can reverse the crime against peace that ushered in this occupation. Given the trumping power the US seems to hold over any meaningful international process, no immediate accounting will occur. However, the future portends realignment with impetus that will be traceable to this episode. Meaning will return to international relations, as it must. Drunken delusion of unlimited power within the United States will face a reckoning of a scope and nature we cannot now predict.
Posted in commentary | Comments Off