Prewar Intel Falls Flat

Is there any prewar intel that doesn't collapse under scrutiny? LA Times (free reg. req.)

BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

Damning:

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

More damning:

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

And then there's this:

CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.

Curveball's German visa must certainly be considered the most expensive in the history of the world. Coming in at more than $200B US taxpayer dollars, more than 2000 US lives, and untold tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed in the conduct of the war.

But of course, his words only matter if smarter, less corrupt people than him believe them. Inexplicably, they did.

It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va.

Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches.

The system led to confusion, not clarity.

"Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out."

"Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official.

As an American citizen and taxpayer, I want people held accountable for this fiasco. The "mobile weapons labs" were a prominent piece of the administration case for war, but it really sounds like anyone with a bit of common sense would have taken one look at Curveball and wondered why he should be believed.

As former Senator Bob Graham explains in today's Post, the highly classified materials made available to a select few on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence contained a fair amount of dissenting views, but these were not widely circulated because of their classification.

Here's is Graham's account of the process that led to the creation and publication of a National Intelligence Estimate in the run up to the Iraq invasion:

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

On July 23, 2002, Tony Blair's cabinet met to discuss the Defence chief's recent trip to Washington. The minutes of that meeting record this statement: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

I don't see how anyone can look at the evidence available to us today and conclude that this means anything but that the administration was relying on any information whatsoever, however unreliable the source, to push a case for war. In the best light, this is irresponsible. In the worst it's certainly criminal.

The public elects officials with the understanding that those individuals will be responsible for issues of war and peace, among a great many other things. We expect that our officials will rely on wise counsel and exercise sound judgement in making these extraordinarily important decisions.

Bush didn't merely fail to do that. It looks for all the world as though he chose not to. He wanted to invade Iraq, so his administration cooked up the rationale using whatever half baked ingredients they could get their hands on, and then they treated the occupation of Iraq with exactly the same type of leadership.

Posted by shamanic at November 20, 2005 01:21 PM | TrackBack