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The Source of the Iraqi WMD Claims Comes Clean ... And Shows that the American and British Governments Willfully Manipulated the Evidence
As I've repeatedly pointed out, everyone knew that Iraq didn't have WMDs.
The Guardian just interviewed the infamous "Curveball" who provided false evidence about Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. Curveball admitted that he knowingly lied
about WMDs, in order to topple Saddam Hussein. Today, the Guardian is
running a series of articles on Curveball which reinforce the conclusion
that the American and British governments deliberately manipulated the
evidence to justify the Iraqi invasion.
In one article, the Guardian notes :
The
former head of the CIA in Europe ... Tyler Drumheller, who says he
warned the head of the US intelligence agency before the 2003 invasion
of Iraq that Curveball might be a liar ....
***
"My
impression was always that his reporting was done in January and
February," said Drumheller, adding that he had been warned well before
2003 by his counterparts in the German secret service (BND) that
Curveball might not be reliable. "We didn't know if it was true. We
knew there were real problems with it and there were inconsistencies."
He
passed on this information to the head of the CIA, George Tenet, he
said, and yet Curveball's testimony still made it into Colin Powell's
famous February 2003 speech justifying an invasion. "Right up to the
night of Powell's speech, I said, don't use that German reporting
because there's a problem with that," said Drumheller.
***
He
recalled a conversation he had with John McLaughlin, then the CIA's
deputy director. "The week before the speech, I talked to the Deputy
McLaughlin, and someone says to him, 'Tyler's worried that Curveball
might be a fabricator.
"And McLaughlin said, 'Oh, I hope not, because this is really all we have.' And I said, and I've got to be honest with you, I said: 'You've got to be kidding? his is all we have!'"
In a second article, the Guardian reports:
A
senior aide to Colin Powell at the time of his pivotal speech to the
United Nations said on Tuesday that Curveball's admission raised
questions about the CIA's role.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief
of staff to the then US secretary of state Powell in the build-up to
the invasion, said the lies of Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, also known
by the codename Curveball, raised questions about how the CIA had
briefed Powell ahead of his crucial speech to the UN security council
presenting the case for war.
In particular, why did the CIA's
then director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin believe the
claim by Curveball, "and convey that to Powell even though the CIA's own European chief Tyler Drumheller had already raised serious doubts.
"And
why did Tenet and McLaughlin portray the presence of mobile biological
labs in Iraq to the secretary of state with a degree of conviction
bordering on passionate, soul-felt certainty?"
***
"This is
very damning testimony and an indictment of the work the US put into
the pre-war intelligence. The decision to go to war, to spend billions
on sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the region, was in
large part taken on the basis of an admitted liar," said Ashwin Madia, head of an organisation of progressive US military veterans, VoteVets.
***
Judith
Yaphe, a former CIA analyst on Iraq now at the National Defence
University in Washington, said ... "There were people at the time who
doubted what Curveball was saying, but if the administration doesn't
want to believe it, it doesn't make much difference."
And in
a third piece, Carne Ross - Britain's former Iraq expert at the UN
security council, and the person responsible for liaison with the
weapons inspectors - writes:
Again, we will be confronted with the "not my fault!" excuse from those who manufactured the case for an avoidable war.
But once again, they are trying to mislead. Here's why.
As
I learned in my work on Iraq's WMD in the late 90s and early 2000s,
when I was Britain's Iraq expert at the UN security council and
responsible for liaison with the weapons inspectors, intelligence on WMD
is a confusing and complicated issue. There was a great deal of data,
much of it contradictory, from an array of different sources –
intercepts of communications, aerial and satellite imagery and "humint"
from defectors or agents inside Iraq. Our task in the government was to
try to make sense of all this, and interpret from the data a
reasonably plausible and coherent picture of what was actually going
on.
***
Given the complexity of the data, no single source could ever be taken as authoritative. And the
least convincing sources – by their very nature – were defectors. We
knew full well that, for very understandable reasons, defectors had a
powerful incentive to exaggerate the nature of Iraq's development of
WMD. They hated Saddam and wanted him gone. Long before Curveball,
there were other defectors who made sometimes wild claims about Iraq's
weapons programmes. I remember one report that suggested Iraq had armed
its Scud missiles (none of which, in fact, existed, it later emerged)
with nuclear warheads, ready to be launched at Israel and other
targets. Defector intelligence was, therefore, lowest in the hierarchy
of evidence; photographic or signals intercepts were, for obvious
reasons, treated as more plausible.
***
All evidence
had to be tested by the simple method of seeking corroboration from
other sources. This method was used across Whitehall, and in the
Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office in particular, and was the
basis for the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments of the WMD
threat, several of which I contributed to. In the years I worked on the
subject (1997-2002), the picture produced by this method was very
clear: there was no credible evidence of substantial stocks of WMD in Iraq.
And
it was this method – clearly – that was abandoned in advance of the
war. Instead of a careful cross-checking of evidence, reports that
suited the story of an imminent Iraqi threat were picked out, polished
and formed the basis of public claims like Colin Powell's presentation to the UN security council, or the No 10 dossier. This
was exactly how a false case for war was constructed: not by the
deliberate creation of a falsehood, but by willfully and secretly
manipulating the evidence to exaggerate the importance of reports like
Curveball's, and to ignore contradictory evidence.
***
Others of my former colleagues in the MOD and Foreign Office have
freely admitted to me that this is precisely what took place. Yet, for
all its subtlety and secrecy, we should name this process for what it
was: the manufacture of a lie.
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Disgusting.
@ WTF
they workin' on it
http://www.rightsandwrongs.co.uk/asia/philippines/7007-politics-running-...
I have a simply suggestion. Obama should demand that Tenant return his Medal of Freedom. That would seem to be the least we could do to punish such a monumental error in judgment (and that's assuming that Tenant actually believed Curveball).
i think Obama should find a despot and put him in charge of Iraq. Let us return Iraq as much as possible to the way it was before the war. To make ammends.
Sure, sure.
US citizens love that idea: it is possible to reverse the past. It somehow helps them to dilute their responsibility in the present. Whatever they do, they can reverse.
How duplicitous considering their record...
Like Doc Brown tells Marty that "Its your KIDS!" at the end of Back to the Future, it was all about Saddam's kids. They had to be stopped. That's the real story.
No one is surprised, no one gives a shit. Game is over.
Curveball, that is rich. You can't make this shit up.
....yes, and W and Dick just need to avoid transcontinental flights. Otherwise, carry on.
What just happened to your last post?
Senator: "There Are No More Excuses for Avoiding an Independent Review and Assessment of How the FBI Handled its Investigation in the Anthrax Case"Oh it got buried by newer posts. Man you're on a roll!
Good grief, George. Saddam Hussein, (not Barry) not only had WMD, he used them..., twice. He used poison gas against Irag, and against the Kurds. I guess mass murder doesn't count in your book, if you have a chance to get in one more cheap shot at Bush.
There are real problems in the world. Time to ease up on the lies and character assasination.
"Saddam Hussein, (not Barry) not only had WMD, he used them..., twice."
Do a bit of research as to what constitutes WMD. NOTE: poison gas isn't one.
British first used gas bombs on Iraqis back in the early 20th century. Should the US invade Britain? I mean, seeing as there appears to be no statute of limitations (the gassing, which I could present contradictory [from a former CIA member] information on the Halabja event, ocurred over 15 years to the US invasion).
For more historical (factual) run, check out the early oil lease contracts in Iraq. Interesting that the 75 year leases ran out in the early 90s. Just happened to coincide with Gulf War I, which then resulted in oil sanctions. Yeah, the West was going to lose control of Iraqi oil for good.
The killing is all associated with oil. What are YOU doing about it?
" ... I guess mass murder doesn't count in your book ..."
What BULLSHIT.
How many Iraqis have WE killed since that clusterfuck IMPERIALIST invasion and occupation started? I'm SURE it ranks up there with "mass murder".
I'm not taking GW's side either. I believe this article like most of GW's stuff is emotional bullshit ranting, wasting ZH bandwith and wasting readers' time.
We killed about 10K mostly jihadis and their human shields. The jihadis killed the rest.
Remember the regular market suicide bombings?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his politics depends on not understanding it." - apologies Upton Sinclair
MSimon,
I'll try to remember that wonderful Upton Sinclair observation and quote. I'm continually and constantly amazed by the slobbering longing for the return to the days of Saddam butchering the people of Iraq.
you should apologize to upton, he would despise your politics were he alive.
Were you on acid in the 80's or eat the paint in your house growing up?
Are you blind to the truth staring you in your Pee Wee face? Another troll.
Ned, I think Pee Wee was talking to the Cheneyite... it can be hard to tell where the replies end up sometimes.
PeeWee?
Whose mass murder? We support evil dictators until they don't serve our purpose. (See: Egypt et al) Bush's daddy encouraged the Kurds to rise up after Gulf One, promised we'd have their back and then sat back and watched them get slaughtered.
Then along comes Daddy's son with his pony pal Cheney too, they have a big secret meeting with industry about peak oil and make maps where all the sweet crude lie, they fight like hell in the supreme court to keep it secret, and, conspiracies aside, the very day 911 goes down, Ronny is pulling people aside telling them to link it to Iraq - the last large source of easy high quality crude. They then change their reason for invasion again and again and again while building the biggest emabassy in the world and securing the oil fileds before they secure anything else.
The only defense you have for Bush is that they are no less or more evil than those who have replaced them and who, despite their lies, let them do this, continued to fund it, and have no intention of ever leaving.
I remember not a couple days passed after 9/11 the doctored photos of Atta meeting wiht "Iraqi intelligence" in Germany were all over TV and I said to my spouse can you believe they're going to use this as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, and no one talks about how the hijackers were all Saudis? Un-fucking-believable.
We had pages of reasons. Did you read them? Or just get your talking points from Media Matters.
in the end this argument matters little. there are what six million israelis (maybe thirteen million jews world wide and fewer and fewer of them love israel) and a billion muslims? does that sound like the tide of history to you?
israel as currently configured is not to the long run advantage of jewish israelis or jews generally. indeed the massive irony is the zionist entity was established in the wildly mistaken idea that jews after ww2 needed someplace safe. so they established a country from other peoples' land and founded the only place in the world where there's a reasonable chance millions of them will be killed, again (suitcase nukes, etc.). men decide, the gods laugh.
The WMDs did not exist at the time the decision to go to war was made. Simple as that. It was a lie, and a well known lie to TPTB at that. Right up there with the decision to confuse the American public into believing Saddam was involved with 9/11. Complete fabrication.
The point is to tell something resembling the truth before going to war, right? I'll guess you might have a problem with that concept.
And Bush was a lying sack of shit right along wth Cheney and the rest of the neocons. It'd be a cheap shot only if it wasn't true. This has nothing to do with Obama and your moronic joke about Hussein is old and tired.
Junk away - I'm tired of idiots spewing this horse manure.
Ned, your a dummy. Go cut your hair put on some decent clothes and get real. Every intelligence service around thought there were WMD's and that is a fact. Should he have ignored them. What would you have said if he had ignored them and there was an attack with WMD's. You are just dumb. Like I said, go cut your hair, flower child.
http://guerillatics.com
Watch "The Green Zone". It pretty much sums it up without naming names. Now they are finally proving it all to be true. By the way, the movie is based on a non-fiction book.
Chemical weapons can be procured in rapid fashion if you have the blueprint. Not unlike meth labs as long as you have the blueprint you can have a launch-able weapon in weeks.
We had former USMC Capt. Scott Ritter, on the ground, with the UN inspection teams saying there was no WMD.
We tortured guys until they would learn to say 'Yes' there was uranium from Niger.
All indefensible actions by a free people who are no longer free.
The first Republic in the 5,000 year history of republics, to be dissolved via accute narcolepsy.
Ritter was paid by Saddam. Reliable source for sure.
I seem to recall that Mr. Hussien enjoyed playing that WMD game. He used to fuck around and pretend that he had them. He did gas some of the minorities as an object lesson.
So far ago...
My, my, my... I learned something on US citizens thanks to the Mad Man from the Desert Saddam Hussein.
US citizens are so quick to dismiss the past and yet they cling to past actions of Hussein to rationalize their false claims on WMDs.
Impressive.
The fact is Hussein had WMDs. He no longer had when the charge was made.
Reliable how?
The Mad Man from The Desert Saddam Hussein allegedly paid a guy to tell there was no WMDs. If you think so...
Meanwhile, the US invested resources to claim there were WMDs.
Who was the most reliable?
Invasion of Iraq showed no WMDs.
Propagandists argumentation is growing more pitiful each time.
Actually, it is even no longer propaganda, but fantasy. US citizens are building a world of fantasy.
@ ned
it turns out the wmd story is a known lie. these are things that we know are lies. there are unkown lies. that is to say, there are lies that we don't know are lies. but there are also unkown liars' lies. there are lies that the liar believes are true, but aren't, and we don't know.
Lol
It was a lie, and a well known lie to TPTB at that.
BULLSHIT.
cogent reasoning closely argued; great evidence too. you've changed my mind.
+++++
++++++
Time for Curveball gate!
OIL- Operation Iraqi Liberation
I wonder if it was an ironic accident or just an inside joke amongst the globalists? They really do like toying with us sheeple.
I find the article pathetic. Virtually every intelligence source in europe and in the middle east thought he had WMD's, so the premise of the article that this one source "proves" anything is silly. If Bush and crew had done nothing, and Saddam had eventually used WMD's and even one source had been found to say there were weopons prior to the event, oh my would there have been an uproar. The fact is, the Bush administration was told Saddam had WMD's by several sources (as were a whole lot of others) and he acted. The article attempts to re-write history. If the left really cared about the country they would take a close look at the monetary and fiscal policies of BHO and do something about that, but noooo, they prefer time travel and mental masturbation. Maybe they should explore teapot dome scandal.
http://guerillatics.com
Lets face it, give them welfare cheques, pop idol and bit of football and they wont even notice.
The got the masses pretty well figured out, i suppose they've had centuries to fine tune how to control the masses.
I never knew you spelled Freedom with an L. How convenient for the Globalists who are out to rape your mother and eat your cookies. They are not totally evil. They will leave you with some warm milk.
Freedom is not spelled with a L. Liberty is though.
Saddam "mass graves" Hussein is gone. The Iraqi people have self government. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. If the rest of the ME falls we are going to need some friends in the region. The Iraqi people are a good bet. The Jews are just about a sure thing. Of course on this board having the ME Jews as friends is considered a bad thing.
It was a bad thing the Jews derailed Iraq's WMD program in 1981. Except in hindsight. But not to worry. By 2003 Saddam had outsourced the project through the Kahn network to Libya. But Libya gave it up when the Libyan's noticed what happened in Iraq.
Did I forget to mention that Saddam was paying $25K for dead Jews? On this board I guess that makes Saddam a hero and US policy in 2003 "unfortunate".
Gibberish.
The US is at starving part of the world through monetary policies. Would it be a bad thing that a country invades the US to stop that thing?
I am already in the streets surrounding the stadium, waiting for the ball to be kicked in row z as hard as you can. I'll catch it.
Yes, it is a bad thing. We had no right to attack Iraq and we "liberated" hundreds of thousands of Iraqi souls from their bodies, for oil, based on lies.
I neglected to mention that Saddam's Baathist Party modeled itself after the National Socialists of Germany. Given the sentiment on this board it was a good thing.
Not to worry. The Baathists still hold sway in Syria.
And the Muslim Brotherhood? Allies of the Nazis in WW2. As were the Palestinian Arabs.
Good times.
where to begin. the "m e jews" are not allies in the region. they are an anchor around the neck of the u.s. as it flounders in higher seas. because of the blind support of them we are hated and distrusted throughout the muslim world. because they are such poison to the surrounding population the zionist entity could not assist the u.s. in iraq in any obvious way (indeed the plan to invade was an invention of theirs and their u.s. allies). further the z.e. connection was so toxic the relatively democratic turkey refused the u.s. overflight/transit so all troops had to come from the south, a significant disadvantage (nothing like the utter lack of preparation for occupation but that's w. bush's nature).
better get ready for darker days. when more muslim autocrats fall, the relative "hands off" policies of the surrounding nations re: israel will likely change as the governments reflect the so understandable hatred of israel by the surrounding population. it is highly unlikely that the absurdly one sided army/air force pitched battles of the past will be replicated given the very instructive events of the last decade.