We paid to fool ourselves

It is a good time for another complete examination of the Chalabi-Curveball phony intelligence story. In March, I posted an extensive review of the entire year of Chalabi's falsehoods, that somehow were routed through the Lie Factory known as the Pentagon Office of Special Plans.

Since then, there has been a much ballyhooed falling out, as the US raided Chalabi's Baghdad residence. Colin Powell has openly questioned his own propaganda efforts, the LA Times has posted a follow-up story ("As suspicion of Chalabi deception intensifies, former administration favorite is believed to have fed disinformation on Hussein's weapons to intelligence agencies in at least eight nations"), and a New Yorker article laid out how "Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war" while receiving oodles of taxpayer money and perks like a Tehran villa, right in the middle of the Axis of Evil, also at US taxpayer expense.

"We paid to fool ourselves", is how one commentator quoted in the New Yorker article put it.

Here is a reproduction of the extensive report I prepared last March 31:

"This is the one that's damning"
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.