Bush Tries To Blame CIA For His Leadership Failings
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BUSH THREW US A 'CURVEBALL'
Report shines unflattering light on key WMD informant.
April 5, 2005 – Last October, just weeks before the presidential
election, I wrote a column stating that the acting director of the CIA
was suppressing a report to Congress that was potentially embarrassing
to President Bush's campaign. The report had been completed by the CIA's
own independent inspector general four months before the election, yet
the agency rebuffed Congress' request that it be made public.
Now, thanks to last week's release of another report, that of the
Bush-appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United
States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, we learn that the
embargoed CIA report centered on the outrageous case of the now-infamous
Iraqi informant known by the code name, "Curveball."
Unfortunately for the American people, we were to an embarrassing extent
persuaded to go to war based on the fantasies of this known liar, the
main source of the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had a
functioning biological weapons program. It was Curveball, an Iraqi
chemical engineer who defected, who was the inspiration for
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's statements before the United
Nations that the U.S. knew Iraq possessed mobile bio-weapons labs.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the presidential commission's finding
that Curveball's unreliability was withheld from the unwitting Powell,
even as the administration was pushing him out onto the world stage to
trade his prodigious credibility for world support for the invasion.
Ironically, Powell's U.N. sales job, which had the U.S. press raving
about his statesmanlike bearing and brilliant mind, was aimed squarely
at rebutting the conclusions of U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground in
Iraq, who were not finding the weapons and weapons-making facilities
that U.S. intelligence agencies had pinpointed.
Yet, as the commission's report makes indelibly clear, the U.N.
inspectors – who exercised extraordinary access in Iraq before the March
2003 invasion – were right. From the aluminum tubes debunked by the U.S.
Energy Department to the Africa uranium story debunked by Ambassador Joe
Wilson, from the anthrax-laden drone aircraft that White House briefers
told senators threatened Florida to Curveball's futuristic-sounding
mobile bio-weapons labs that have never been found, Powell and the White
House were, as the president's commission has just unanimously
concluded, "dead wrong."
The case of Curveball was relevant to the election because it went to
the heart of the administration's competency in managing national
security. At best, what emerges from the presidential commission's
report is a picture of an American leadership in total disarray on
national security; at worst, it shows widespread complicity at the top
in a concerted effort to deceive the electorate on matters of war.
Recall that then-CIA Director George Tenet, later rewarded by Bush with
the Medal of Freedom, provided the basic briefing and final vetting of
Powell's disastrously false presentation of the case against Iraq.
According to the commission's report, Tenet was working with Powell the
night before the U.N. speech when he spoke on the phone to a
high-ranking CIA official who warned him not to rely on Curveball's
information. That warning had been issued by others in the agency, but
Tenet claims that he cannot recollect hearing it.
In fact, the CIA had long harbored strong doubts concerning Curveball's
veracity. The foreign government holding him had even informed the U.S.
that the Iraqi exile was a "fabricator" who had suffered a "nervous
breakdown" and was "crazy." But his words were spirited all the way to
the top of the administration because they conveniently supported its
vision to use 9/11 as an excuse to create a compliant Middle East
through aggressive use of U.S. military power.
After the occupation of Iraq in spring 2003, the massive U.S. Iraq
Survey Group confirmed that Curveball was either hallucinating or lying,
finding no WMD or WMD facilities. It turns out the informant wasn't even
in Iraq at the time he claimed to be working on biological weapons.
The Curveball case was definitively closed when the CIA gained access to
the Iraqi defector in March 2004 and categorically repudiated his story.
That was half a year before the U.S. presidential election, however, and
clearly the White House didn't want the CIA inspector general to blow
the whistle and embarrass the president as he fought for his political
survival.
To squelch the exposure of such widespread incompetence and deadly
manipulation of national security intelligence is a betrayal of democracy.
Copyright © 2005 Robert Scheer