Curveball and the ``everybody agreed'' canard

Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 before the United Nations Security Council: ``My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.''

The oft-repeated rightist defense of the Bush administration pre-war public relations campaign against Iraq's nonexistent weapons is that ``everybody agreed, but all were wrong'' about the WMD. The president, Prime Minister Blair, and other officials merely reacted with war due to their sincerely held beliefs that Iraq was some sort of threat. Now that they know war-&-sanctions-battered Iraq was not a threat, there still is no sign they will release their chokehold on the country anytime soon. They are still not forthcoming with the true motivations behind the major underlying policy decisions concerning the war. But that's another matter and I'll address it in a future post.

For now, I want to call attention to a new posting at Booman Tribune by Col. Patrick Lang, a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces. In this posting, Lang lays out and analyzes today's LA Times follow-up story on ``Curveball'' -- the intelligence fabricator on whom Bush administration claims of marauding Iraqi ``Winnebagoes of Death'' (mobile bioweapons labs) were based.

A taste:

CURVEBALL, the Iraqi source of the German intelligence (BND) became an essential element in the campaign of distorted and manipulated information. CURVEBALL was a fraud. The Germans said they did not believe him. DIA said they did not believe him, but the Bush Administration evidently did believe him. Why? They believed because they wanted to believe.

Now just one more quote, this time from President Bush on January 28, 2003 in the State of the Union message:

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them. [emphasis added]

Obviously, they did not ``know'' anything of the sort. The mobile labs never existed, even during the era of US & UK support for the real Iraqi bioweapons program in the 1980s.

My personal opinion is there was intentional pre-war distortion that this fabricated intelligence was solid -- by the president, Secretary Powell, and other officials. The idea was to cherry pick whatever shards of intelligence they could get their hands on (and if necessary, create), and then puff it up into a threat case sufficient to provoke the desired drumbeat response from the Congress, the media, and the public. It worked so well that it's hard to keep count the US soldiers, US Marines, and Iraqi civilians who keep dying as a result of the international crimes that followed.

So it is a rightist canard that there was an ``overwhelming consensus'' of world intelligence services that Saddam had weapons in March 2003. In fact the opposite was true. Warnings were rife in late 2002 and early 2003 about the shakiness of sources on which all of the main claims were based. These were not just minor peripheral nitpicks on an overwhelming consensus, but rather a complete collapse of the essential claims. And it is now known that that the collapse of these claims was evident before the war.

Nonetheless, it was months and months after the invasion before the promotion of the fabricated claims was abandoned. I analyzed this period in a long post written at two different times during the spring of 2004, after the initial LA Times story on Curveball emerged. The president's handpicked weapons inspector, David Kay, a gung-ho believer, recognized the ``damning'' falsehoods behind the case for war earlier than other administration officials, Powell included. (I don't think Cheney has yet renounced the mobile bioweapons labs as the fakes they were). Read that whole post -- ``We paid to fool ourselves'' -- here.

Recommended further reading
Rodger Payne has some excellent posts laying out this history with lots and lots of high-quality references. He examines the president's Veteran's Day shots taken against the anti-war movement. (I had wanted to post on that, but could not find enough time. Rodger does a great job there.) Please see:

(1) The Iraq "threat", Saturday November 19; and
(2) The administration's deceptions, Monday November 14