The depth of the CIA's distortions over WMDs has been revealed, Marian Wilkinson writes.
The day before the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivered his critical speech to the United Nations saying Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories, a US intelligence agent warned the CIA that the evidence had come from an Iraqi defector called Curve Ball who was unreliable and possibly an alcoholic.

Despite that warning, the CIA did not change Powell's speech, which was designed to persuade the UN Security Council to vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq in February last year. The CIA Iraq officer who received the warning placated his colleague in an email before Powell spoke.

"Let's keep in mind, the war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations," he wrote.

Powell's speech went ahead with the false information from Curve Ball that Iraq had developed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
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Powell told the Security Council: "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 supposed eyewitness accounts came largely from Curve Ball, whom no one in the CIA had met. But the US Defence Intelligence Agency officer detailed to quiz Curve Ball, and who met him once in the custody of a foreign intelligence agency, was sceptical. He wrote to the CIA desk officer in an email that Curve Ball had "a terrible hangover" the morning they met, and the agent thought he was an alcoholic. The email said the agency's operatives in Iraq "were attempting to determine if, in fact, Curve Ball was who he said he was".

The defence intelligence officer continued: "These issues, in my opinion, warrant further inquiry, before we use the information as the backbone of one of our major findings of the existence of a continuing Iraqi BW [biological weapons] program."

The officer pointed out in his email, written the day before Powell's speech, that the other witnesses cited in the draft of the speech were problematic as well. One of the sources was an Iraqi major, the officer wrote.

"This is the Vanity Fair source - who was deemed a fabricator. Need I say more?"

But his colleague at the CIA would not be budged by the concerns. Powell's speech was going to be delivered the next day and the CIA officer thought it was "too far along to bring them up". The email exchange between the CIA's deputy director of its Iraq desk and the defence intelligence officer who handled Curve Ball is just one of scores of devastating revelations in the report of the US Senate committee examining the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Read as a whole, the 500-page report is a scathing indictment of the Western intelligence services' assessment of the threat from Saddam Hussein. But it is especially damning of the CIA, whose officers and their superiors distorted the intelligence on Iraq.

The two senators who led the inquiry, Pat Roberts, a Republican, and Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, called the prewar claims, "a global intelligence failure".

Roberts said: "Before the war, the US intelligence community told the President, as well as the Congress and the public, that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and, if left unchecked, would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.

"Well, today we know these assessments were wrong. They were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."

Rockefeller was blunter: "There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation.

"The fact is that the Administration, at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad information to bolster its case for war."

And Congress "would not have authorised that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now".

The Prime Minister, John Howard, relied on this same wrong intelligence when he went into Parliament last year to justify the invasion of Iraq and the commitment of Australian troops.

He told Parliament: "We cannot walk away from the threat that Iraq's continued possession of weapons of mass destruction constitutes to its region and to the wider world. In the final analysis, the absolute conviction of the Government is that disarming Iraq is necessary for the long-term security of the world and is therefore manifestly in the national interest of Australia."

On page after page in the Senate report, CIA and other US intelligence officers are shown distorting information, covering up or ignoring evidence in order to prosecute the case that Iraq had an active biological and chemical weapons program, and was rebuilding its nuclear weapons capability.

In the case of Curve Ball, it finds, even the CIA's imagery analyst who identified the seven sites Curve Ball named could not find evidence of any biological weapons facilities there.

Another defector source who says Iraq had biological weapons laboratories was described by his Defence Intelligence Agency debriefer as being coached. The defector had been brought to the agency by the Iraqi opposition group led by Ahmad Chalabi. But when the debriefer's report was sent up the line to his superiors, the note on his being coached was removed, and one saying he had passed a polygraph was included.

Soon after the DIA issued a "fabrication notice" about the defector, but his material was still used in Powell's speech.

More disturbing was the failure by the CIA to report that many of its claims about Iraq using its facilities for biological weapons production deliberately ignored information that the facilities were more likely being used for medical or agricultural purposes.

Satellite images showing changes at the Amiriyah agricultural facility were linked with Curve Ball's claims that it was a biological weapons site. But CIA and the defence intelligence officers admitted to the Senate committee that "the activity could have been consistent with legitimate public health-related activities", including "some huge vaccination campaigns against polio and foot and mouth disease".

The CIA's claim that "the chances are even that smallpox is part of Baghdad's offensive BW program" was found not to be supported by evidence. The CIA admitted to the Senate committee: "We have no evidence that Iraq ever weaponised smallpox."

Overall, the report found, while there was intelligence to support the claim that Iraq had the capability of producing biological weapons agents, it could have been "very limited in nature, been abandoned years ago or represented legitimate activity".

Similarly, the report found that claims that Baghdad had chemical weapons stockpiles "overstated both what was known about Iraq's chemical weapons holdings and what intelligence analysts judged about Iraq's chemical weapons holdings".

George Bush will take some comfort from the Republican-dominated Senate committee not finding that the CIA or other intelligence agencies had been pressured by the White House. At the weekend he still insisted that Saddam Hussein had the capability and intent of producing weapons of mass destruction.

The critical second half of the Senate inquiry, which looks at the role of the Administration, especially the Pentagon, in using or abusing the intelligence will not be finished until after the election in November.

Despite this, Bush, like Howard and Tony Blair, will be forced on the defensive by the colossal scale of the intelligence failure revealed by the bipartisan report.

Rockefeller said: "Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing n the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow.

"As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."

While he was talking about the US, the same question will equally be applied to Australia and Britain, the intelligence and military allies who went to war, based, as Rockefeller put it, "on false claims".

Was pretty obvious they had to pick a scapegoat, and Tenet is da winnah!
For their next trick they will thaw out OBL's corpse and plant him in a hooch in Lower Whaddafugistan where he will be "captured" in a daring operation which inspires several books and films. This will happen around October 15th.
Four more years LOL.

I think it'd be much better if they pulled the mask off OBL and it was ODB. Ol' dirty, you so crazay!

Lol