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[Wow, almost three years later, the truth becomes a public issue. The White House calls this report "irresponsible", and clings to the incompetence defense.]


Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary


By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; Page A01

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

- mark 4-13-2006 8:07 am [link] [1 ref]

[Sarin Nerve Toxin -- $150B per gallon.]

Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell
FOXNEWS -- May 18, 2004

NEW YORK — Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin (search), Defense Department officials told Fox News Tuesday.

The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent.

Three liters is about three-quarters of a gallon; four liters is a little more than a gallon.

"A little drop on your skin will kill you" in the binary form, said Ret. Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, founder of Homeland Security Associates. "So for those in immediate proximity, three liters is a lot," but he added that from a military standpoint, a barrage of shells with that much sarin in them would more likely be used as a weapon than one single shell.

The soldiers displayed "classic" symptoms of sarin exposure, most notably dilated pupils and nausea, officials said. The symptoms ran their course fairly quickly, however, and as of Tuesday the two had returned to duty.

The munition found was a binary chemical shell, meaning it featured two chambers, each containing separate chemical compounds. Upon impact with the ground after the shell is fired, the barrier between the chambers is broken, the chemicals mix and sarin is created and dispersed.

Intelligence officials stressed that the compounds did not mix effectively on Saturday. Due to the detonation, burn-off and resulting spillage, it was not clear exactly how much harmful material was inside the shell.

A 155-mm shell can hold two to five liters of sarin; three to four liters is likely the right number, intelligence officials said.

Another shell filled with mustard gas (search), possibly also part of an improvised explosive device (IED) was discovered on May 2, Defense Dept. officials said.

The second shell was found by passing soldiers in a median on a thoroughfare west of Baghdad. It probably was simply left there by someone, officials said, and it was unclear whether it was meant to be used as a bomb.

- mark 5-19-2004 9:32 am [link] [1 ref]

[This article fails to mention that the finding of sarin was only a field test, and that laboratory tests will be required to confirm this finding.

The always predictable NewsMax as a different take ...

WMD Confirmed: Sarin Bomb Explodes
Proof beyond a doubt Saddam had WMD. Iraqi insurgents use chemical weapon and media ignore the story. ]

Shell said to contain sarin poses a dilemma for U.S.
Houston Chronicle -- May 18, 2004

By MICHAEL HEDGES Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- American officials from Baghdad to Washington scrambled Monday to determine whether the explosion of a shell they said contained poison gas posed a new threat to U.S. soldiers or proved Saddam Hussein's regime kept significant illegal weapons.

Two soldiers were slightly injured when the artillery shell rigged as a roadside bomb exploded Saturday, dispersing a small amount of a chemical agent that experts concluded was sarin, coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Monday from Baghdad.

- mark 5-18-2004 10:42 am [link]

[Deliberately Misleading???]

Guests: Secretary Colin Powell, Department of State; Senator Joseph Biden, D-DE, Ranking Member, Foreign Relations Committee; Senator John McCain, R-AZ, Armed Services Committee
NBC News' Meet the Press -- May 16, 2004

Russert: Thank you very much, sir. In February of 2003, you put your enormous personal reputation on the line before the United Nations and said that you had solid sources for the case against Saddam Hussein. It now appears that an agent called Curveball had misled the CIA by suggesting that Saddam had trucks and trains that were delivering biological and chemical weapons. How concerned are you that some of the information you shared with the world is now inaccurate and discredited?

Powell: I'm very concerned. When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully; we looked at the sourcing in the case of the mobile trucks and trains. There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate. And so I'm deeply disappointed. But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.

- mark 5-18-2004 11:01 am [link]

Powell says bad data misled him on Iraq
Los Angeles Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- April 3, 2004

Washington -- Secretary of State Colin Powell directly criticized the intelligence community for the first time Friday for giving him apparently flawed information that he used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Powell said the "most dramatic'' of his allegations -- that Saddam Hussein's regime had mobile germ labs -- was based on questionable U.S. intelligence
The allegations were central to the evidence that Powell dramatically presented to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, as he urged a skeptical world body to confront Hussein.

Powell said that as he prepared for his U.N. presentation, intelligence officials gave him data from four sources on mobile weapons laboratories. He insisted that he had pushed them to make sure their analysis was correct.

"It was presented to me in the preparation of that (portfolio of evidence) as the best information and intelligence that we had," he said. "They certainly indicated to me ... that it was solid.

"Now it appears not to be the case that it was solid,'' he said.

He called on a federal commission investigating prewar intelligence to examine how the data had been gathered.

The comments were an abrupt reversal for Powell, who had acknowledged disagreements among analysts but had not criticized the intelligence agencies.

- mark 4-04-2004 5:00 pm [link]

Curveball
Whiskey Bar -- April 3, 2004


- mark 4-04-2004 12:29 pm [link]

Germans accuse US over Iraq weapons claim
The Guardian -- April 2, 2004

Luke Harding in Berlin An Iraqi defector nicknamed Curveball who wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had mobile chemical weapons factories was last night at the centre of a bitter row between the CIA and Germany's intelligence agency.

German officials said that they had warned American colleagues well before the Iraq war that Curveball's information was not credible - but the warning was ignored.
It was the Iraqi defector's testimony that led the Bush administration to claim that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railway wagons to produce anthrax and other deadly germs.

In his presentation to the UN security council in February last year, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, explicitly used Curveball's now discredited claims as justification for war. The Iraqis were assembling "mobile production facilities for biological agents", Mr Powell said, adding that his information came from "a solid source".

These "killer caravans" allowed Saddam to produce anthrax "on demand", it was claimed. US officials never had direct access to the defector, and have subsequently claimed that the Germans misled them.

Yesterday, however, German agents told Die Zeit newspaper that they had warned the Bush administration long before last year that there were "problems" with Curveball's account. "We gave a clear credibility assessment. On our side at least, there were no tricks before Colin Powell's presentation," one source told the newspaper.

Officially, Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has refused to comment.

The revelation is embarrassing for the Bush administration and appears to bolster the contention that it used dubious intelligence in a partisan manner in the critical few weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

It has now emerged that Curveball is the brother of a top aide of Ahmad Chalabi, the pro-western Iraqi former exile with links to the Pentagon.

According to the Los Angeles Times, it was UN inspectors who came up with the idea that Saddam might have developed mobile factories to try to evade weapons inspections. They asked Mr Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Saddam, to find evidence to support the theory.

Recently, American officials have admitted that Curveball's information was false. Meanwhile, David Kay, who resigned as head of the Iraqi survey group in January after a fruitless nine-month search for weapons of mass destruction, said in an interview that Curveball had been "absolutely at the heart of the matter", but had turned out to be an "out and out fabricator".

US and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since the war that much of the information supplied by Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and other Iraqi groups was wrong. Yesterday, German sources said they were bemused by the idea that they had tricked the US. "We ask ourselves, what are they on about?" one said.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

- mark 4-04-2004 5:04 pm [link]

ASIO erred in ignoring WMD info: Democrat
The Age -- April 2, 2004

By Russell Skelton
Australian Democrats Leader Andrew Bartlett yesterday described ASIO's decision not to interview a top Iraqi scientist about the location of five claimed chemical weapons bunkers as extraordinary and troubling.

"On the evidence available it is strange that they did not investigate his claims further. It doesn't sound at all inspiring," Senator Bartlett said.

He said the scientist's claims should have been thoroughly scrutinised as a matter of routine. "It seems they just followed up one little piece of information and then decided to let the entire matter drop," he said.

The Age revealed yesterday that a top Iraqi scientist, who uses the pseudonym Rashid, offered the Federal Government information purporting to pinpoint the location of five secret bunkers just days before the Iraq war began. The scientist, a key member of Saddam's inner circle of scientific advisers before fleeing to Australia in 1999, offered the information to the assistant director of the Immigration Department's intelligence unit, who found him to be credible and referred the information to ASIO. But a senior ASIO manager subsequently dismissed it as being of "no further interest" and he was never interviewed.

- mark 4-03-2004 2:08 pm [link]

Powell no longer sure Iraqi trailers were weapons labs
AP via Boston Globe -- April 2, 2004

By Barry Schweid
WASHINGTON (AP) Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Friday evidence he presented to the United Nations that two trailers in Iraq were used for weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong.

- mark 4-03-2004 2:02 pm [link]

Der Bumerang-Spion
Nach der Geheimdienstschlappe im Irak wehrt die CIA Vorwürfe ab. Stattdessen beschuldigt sie den BND: Er habe die USA nicht vor einem Lügenbold gewarnt

Die Zeit -- 1 April 2004

Von Jochen Bittner

Er war der wichtigste Informant für einen der schwersten Vorwürfe, den die amerikanische Regierung im Frühjahr 2003 gegen Saddam Hussein vorbrachte. Curveball nannte die CIA den Mann aus dem Irak. Ein vielsagender Deckname. Er stammt aus dem Baseball und bezeichnet Würfe, die dem Ball einen Spin verpassen und so die Flugbahn krümmen. Eine kunstvoll-trickreiche und meist durchschlagende Technik. Doch mittlerweile haben sich Curveballs scharfe Anwürfe gegen Saddam Hussein als Schlappen entpuppt. Die CIA ist gar nicht mehr stolz auf ihn – und schiebt die Verantwortung für einen der schlimmsten Geheimdienstfehler vor dem Irak-Krieg dem deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienst zu.
[Translated by Google.]

That Boomerang Spy
Die Zeit -- 1 April 2004
by Jochen Bittner

He was the most important informant for one of the heaviest reproaches, which the American government stated in the spring 2003 against Saddam Hussein. Curveball called the CIA the man from the Iraq. A much-saying pseudonym. It originates from the baseball and designates throws, which give a spin to the ball and curve so the flight path. A art-full-sophistiated and usually piercing technology. But meanwhile Curveballs sharp have themselves would start against Saddam Hussein as Schlappen emerged. The CIA is not proud any longer on it  and pushes over the responsibility for one of the worst secret service errors before the Iraq war the German Federal Information Service.

- mark 4-05-2004 5:20 am [link]

Curveballs on WMD
The press still needs to come clean on hyping Iraqi weapons that haven't been found.

Editor & Publisher -- April 1, 2004

By William E. Jackson Jr.
One year after the war in Iraq began, with media criticism of The New York Times' coverage of the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) continuing, both Bill Keller and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. (the paper's executive editor and publisher) have recently come to the defense of embattled star reporter Judith Miller. The powers that be prefer that the paramount role of the newspaper of record in hyping the WMD threat to be forgotten. Since there's no way to turn back the clock -- and run up to the war again -- why does this issue still matter?
I have two answers:

1. To turn the page on what occurred in the print media before and after the war -- while most major news organizations have yet to admit their sorry record -- is to lose sight of lessons vital for the future of journalistic principles and ethics. While many of them may be publishing hard-hitting reports today, where were U.S. news organizations before the war, when it might have made a difference in exposing the inaccurate, deceptive or fictional evidence contained in the administration's propaganda over the Iraqi WMD threat?

The Washington Post was the main general exception to the charge (the reporting of James Risen in The New York Times notwithstanding). So was Knight Ridder's triple threat of Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott. And the Associated Press' Dafna Linzer demonstrated a consistent record of skepticism in her WMD reporting.

Why were they the exceptions, not the rule?

2. But the supreme reason not to drop the matter of press coverage is the price in blood and treasure that the United States is continuing to pay for the pre-emptive attack -- for which the press served as "enablers." Reporters and editors at major newspapers really did help bring on the war, fanning fears and coddling partisan sources (including Iraqi defectors), while dumbing down the views of experts who questioned the prevailing line in Washington.

Even a first-rate military correspondent like Michael Gordon could co-author with Judith Miller the oft-cited front-page New York Times "mushroom cloud" story of Sept. 8, 2002 ("U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts") that followed close on the heels of Vice President Dick Cheney's speech of August 26 asserting that there was "no doubt" that Saddam had WMD and was prepared to use them. In their own words -- not merely quoting the claims of others -- the two asserted: "Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war."

Keller, when defending Miller on Public Editor Daniel Okrent's Web journal recently, cryptically alluded to the "handling and presenting" of her stories by unnamed editors, suggesting that he should not punish her because they were equally to blame. Who were the editors who let her express highly influential opinions in news stories, get away with poor or partisan sourcing, and who placed her stories on the front page? It was not a rare occurrence for Miller to outright editorialize in a "news" article, as when she stated without qualification that her discoveries in the field bolstered Bush administration claims.

Where, oh where is the ombud?

Where is the Times' new ombudsman one might ask? Gradually, alas, the public editor's unique role at a proud paper that had never had an ombudsman, is being co-opted. Nothing illustrates the point better than last week's "you speak, I record" entry with Keller's defense of Miller in Okrent's Web journal (March 26).

The ombudsman provided a forum for the executive editor to spin a rather lazy defense of Miller's past actions. Keller was permitted to contemptuously dismiss many of the critics of her notorious misreporting on WMD as mere Web surfers, even though Okrent has repeatedly refused to take a critical look back at the stories in dispute (which Keller is now defending). Thus, Okrent can wash his hands in public, as if to say the Times has dealt with that.

Earlier, on Feb. 17, Okrent had allowed Miller herself to challenge quotations attributed to her by Michael Massing in his widely-read "Now They Tell Us" essay in the Feb. 26 issue of The New York Review of Books. Okrent explained that many readers had asked him for comment on the Massing story. Breaking his policy of not addressing controversies that arose before he came on board at the paper on Dec. 1, he nevertheless contacted Miller and included a letter she had sent to the NYRB editors complaining about being misquoted. Massing would stand by his reporting, saying he had checked all the quotes with Miller beforehand.

Fairness demands that Okrent's huge task, with limited resources, be acknowledged. His Web log is now attracting attention, some of it sympathetic as in the case of this reader: "I feel for Dan Okrent. He has to have the hardest job in journalism."

But other correspondents have not been so understanding. A recent letter: "The ombudsman appears unusually reticent to deal with this issue fully and candidly. If Daniel Okrent cannot address direct criticism to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Gail Collins, Bill Keller, and Judith Miller, for their bungling of the WMD story in the lead up to the war, then this office is worthless. This is an ongoing issue, not ancient history. Deal with it."

On another front, so far the public editor has looked the other way in failing to comment on the damning recent statement by Sulzberger on the Miller/WMD controversy. It constituted an indictment of the way he, and Miller's editors, saw her role in covering WMD and the war from "the inside" (reported at E&P Online, March 22).

Sulzberger admitted that Miller's sources were wrong "absolutely." But then "the administration was wrong ... So I don't blame Judy Miller for the lack of finding weapons of mass destruction. I blame the administration for believing its own story line to such a point that they weren't prepared to question the authenticity of what they were told."

Well, if they weren't going to question themselves, wasn't it the role of the press to question them -- instead of so often acting as stenographers for inside sources and defectors? No one is blaming Miller for not finding WMD in Iraq (though she tried mightily while she was there), but rather for hyping their existence before and after the war. The Times too often swallowed the government's narrative on these weapons of mass disappearance.

And some high-placed intelligence analysts (not to mention other members of the media and vast numbers of the American public) surely believed in the authenticity of what the Times was telling them. One imagines a circle of blind animals, linked to one another: The Times tied to the tail of the government which was tied to the tail of Iraqi defectors who were tied to the tail of the Times.

Reporting from the other 'Times'

The latest investigative report by Bob Drogin and Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times ("Iraqi Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War") is about a now discredited source known as 'Curveball' who provided information that Saddam had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs. (These were the "Winnebagos of Death" the Bush administration often warned about.) It turns out U.S. officials never even had direct access to the defector, a brother to one of Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi's top aides.

David Kay told the L.A. Times that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, "this is the one that is the most damning." Curveball was an "out-and-out fabricator."

Chalabi says that he has been unfairly blamed for the failure to find germ warfare trucks, or any other unconventional weapons. He blames the CIA for hyping the threat. Since INC defectors were always tainted as partisans, he asked "60 Minutes" recently: "Why did the CIA believe them so much?" Or, one might add, why did The New York Times find them so credible so often?

Scandal dwarfs all others

It should be noted that Miller was gradually weaned from the WMD/Iraq beat after Keller took over in the summer of 2003. Moreover, several recent articles in the Times by Douglas Jehl and James Risen have focused on the role of defectors and exile groups in fooling U.S. intelligence agencies about the alleged presence of WMD in Iraq.

Journalistic ideals are very much alive in the Times' newsroom. Recently, responding to past columns in E&P, a reporter covering foreign policy at the paper sent me this message: "I share your concern about past wrongs, and remain determined to dig further."

Now Keller should revisit the reporting of Miller and some of her colleagues. To this day, the Times has not seen fit to acknowledge -- in editors' notes (like the one Keller himself co-wrote about the Wen Ho Lee debacle) or editorials or public editor columns -- the egg left on their collective faces from being suckered by highly suspect sources when reporting on WMD in 2002-03. This scandal dwarfs all others under the Gray Lady's skirts.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William E. Jackson Jr. has been covering this subject for E&P since last spring. He was executive director of President Jimmy Carter's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, 1978-80. After affiliations with the Brookings Institution and the Fulbright Institute of International Relations, Jackson writes on national security issues from Davidson, N.C.

© 2004 VNU eMedia Inc.

- mark 4-03-2004 3:07 pm [link]

[You have to read past the headline, and past the lede to see that Duelfer isn't backing up his assertions with hard data.]

Weapons Inspector Testifies on Hill
Suspected Iraqi Bid To Produce Arms on Short Notice Noted

Washington Post, March 31, 2004

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
The new chief U.S. weapons inspector for Iraq told Congress yesterday that no breakthrough has been made in the search for chemical or biological weapons but said new information supports a theory that Saddam Hussein may have been developing an ability to produce them on short notice.

[ ... ]

"The ISG has developed new information regarding Iraq's dual-use facilities and ongoing research suitable for a capability to produce biological or chemical agents on short notice," Duelfer said in the statement. The statement provided little information to back up that position.

After a morning session with the Senate Armed Services Committee, ranking Democrat Carl M. Levin (Mich.) said that the publicly released document left out information in Duelfer's classified testimony that "would lead one to doubt" what he described as Duelfer's "suspicions as to Iraq's activities."

- mark 3-31-2004 11:10 am [link]

Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage
Editor & Publisher -- March 29, 2004

NEW YORK In the wake of Richard Clarke's dramatic personal apology to the families of 9/11 victims last week -- on behalf of himself and his government -- for failing to prevent the terrorist attacks, one might expect at least a few mea culpas related to the release of false information on the Iraq threat before and after the war.

While the major media, from The New York Times on down, has largely remained silent about their own failings in this area, a young columnist for a small paper in Fredericksburg, Va., has stepped forward.

"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there is one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry," Rick Mercier wrote, in a column published Sunday in The Free Lance-Star.

"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.

"Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

- mark 4-03-2004 4:13 pm [link]

Iraqi Defector Behind America's WMD Claims Exposed as 'Out-and-Out Fabricator'
The Independent via Common Dreams -- March 29, 2004

by Andrew Gumbel
The case for war against Iraq was dealt another embarrassing blow yesterday due to claims by an American newspaper that the first-hand intelligence source on Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile bioweapons labs was a politically motivated Iraqi defector now dismissed as an "out-and-out fabricator".

The mobile labs, since exposed by weapons inspectors as hydrogen production facilities at best and phantoms at worst, were one of the centerpieces of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell's prewar address to the United Nations. As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney maintained that discovery of the labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq possessed WMD.

A detailed investigation in the Los Angeles Times revealed that the source claiming to have seen mobile bioweapons labs was the brother of one of the senior aides to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who recently boasted how the erroneous information provided by his group achieved his long-cherished goal of toppling Saddam.

The source, given the unintentionally appropriate code name Curveball, was an asset of German intelligence and was never directly interviewed by US officials. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency do not even know exactly who he is, the LA Times reported.
David Kay, the postwar weapons inspector whose declaration in January that Iraq had no WMD initiated a series of hammer-blows to the credibility of the Bush administration and the British government, described Mr Powell's use of Curveball's information before the UN as "disingenuous".

He told the LA Times: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name', I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Mr Powell told the world on 5 February last year the administration had "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails" capable of producing enough anthrax or botulinum toxin to kill "thousands upon thousands of people". He showed "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured. Revealingly, he could only produce artist renditions, not actual blueprints or photographs.

Since the Powell speech, Curveball's reliability has been destroyed. The German foreign intelligence service, the BND, later warned the CIA that it had "various problems with the source". Curveball also lied about his academic credentials and omitted to tell his interlocutors he had been fired as a chemical engineer for the Iraqi army and jailed for embezzlement before fleeing Iraq in the late 1990s.

The possible existence of mobile labs was touted as a theory by UN weapons inspectors frustrated in 1992 at their failure to find evidence of chemical and biological weapons programs. (Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, later defected and said they had been destroyed in 1991.) The UN inspectors approached Mr Chalabi for help in establishing the existence of the mobile labs in late 1997. Scott Ritter, one of the inspectors, told the LA Times: "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff. It looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

Evidence, much of it tentative, trickled in throughout the 1990s that Saddam may have built mobile labs to conceal his weapons programs. In 1994 Israeli military intelligence indicated that poisons were being made in red and white ice cream trucks and in green moving vans labeled"Sajida Transport" after Saddam's wife. UN inspectors later concluded this information was bogus.

The role of Israeli intelligence in the case for war was the subject of a parliamentary report released in Jerusalem yesterday. An eight-month inquiry resisted the notion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, but lambasted the intelligence agencies for exaggerating Iraqi capabilities, particularly before the war.

Yuval Steinitz, the parliamentarian who led the inquiry, said: "Why didn't we succeed in laying down a broad and deep framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation? That is the central question."

Much the same has been said in the US by veteran intelligence professionals appalled by their government's manipulation of information and Mr Powell's UN speech. Mr Powell is likely to come under the closest scrutiny because he was the member of the Bush administration most trusted internationally and because his presentation seemed so convincing.

In addition to the mobile labs, Mr Powell showed slides of what he said were chemical munitions facilities surrounded by "decontamination vehicles". The "chemical munitions" works were later identified by Mr Ritter and others as a site well-known to UN inspectors. The vehicles were later shown to have been fire engines.

Mr Powell also showed surveillance footage of an Iraq plane dropping simulated anthrax in what he said was a military exercise. It later emerged the plane was destroyed in 1991.

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

- mark 4-03-2004 2:50 pm [link] [1 ref]

Israel faults prewar findings
PANEL EXAMINES IRAQ INTELLIGENCE

San Jose Mercury News -- March 29, 2004

By Michael Matza and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder
JERUSALEM - Israeli intelligence seriously overrated the military capacity of Saddam Hussein in the preparations for the Iraq war because its secret services based their assessments on broad estimates and not hard data, a parliamentary committee said Sunday.

- mark 3-30-2004 9:36 am [link]

Iraqi Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War
Colin Powell presented the U.N. with details on mobile germ factories, which came from a now-discredited source known as 'Curveball.'

Los Angeles Times -- March 28, 2004

By Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with details that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections.

Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis.
U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist, officials said. They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a bitter enemy of Hussein, to help search for intelligence supporting their theory.

Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army.

Based largely on his account, President Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, dubbed "Winnebagos of Death" or "Hell on Wheels" in news accounts, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might have been coached to provide false information. Partly because of that, some U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators fear that the CIA may have inadvertently conjured up and then chased a phantom weapons system.

David Kay, who resigned in January as head of the CIA-led group created to find illicit weapons in Iraq, said that of all the intelligence failures in Iraq, the case of Curveball was particularly troubling.

"This is the one that's damning," he said. "This is the one that has the potential for causing the largest havoc in the sense that it really looks like a lack of due diligence and care in going forward."

Kay said in an interview that the defector "was absolutely at the heart of a matter of intense interest to us." But Curveball turned out to be an "out-and-out fabricator," he added.

Last May, the CIA announced that it had found two of the suspect trucks in northern Iraq, but the agency later backtracked. However, in the absence of evidence to support many of its prewar claims, the Bush administration has continued to cling to the possibility that biowarfare trucks might still exist.

Vice President Dick Cheney as recently as January referred to the trucks as "conclusive" proof that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. CIA Director George J. Tenet later told a Senate committee that he called Cheney to warn him that the evidence was increasingly suspect.

Tenet gave the first hint of the underlying problem in a speech at Georgetown University on Feb. 5.

"I must tell you we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources" about mobile biological weapons production, he said. "Because we lack direct access to the most important sources on this question, we have as yet been unable to resolve the differences."

U.S. and British intelligence officials have acknowledged since major combat ended in Iraq that lies or distortions by Iraqi opposition groups in exile contributed to numerous misjudgments about Iraq's suspected weapons programs. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress is blamed most often, but the rival Iraqi National Accord and various Kurdish groups also were responsible for sending dubious defectors to Western intelligence, officials say.

Still, the Curveball case may be especially damaging because no other credible defector has provided firsthand confirmation that Iraq modified vehicles to produce germ agents, and no proof has been found before or after the end of major combat. Iraqi officials interrogated since the war have all denied that such a program existed.

The story of Curveball is now under close review by an internal panel at the CIA, as well as House and Senate oversight committees. All are seeking to determine why so much of the prewar intelligence now appears seriously flawed.

Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading the internal review, defended the agency's handling of the case. He said there were strong reasons to believe that the vehicles existed because the defector's information was consistent with years of intelligence on Iraq's covert efforts to obtain chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

"It was detailed and specific and made a lot of sense," Kerr said. He said the CIA believed that Iraq was developing and concealing banned weapons programs in civilian chemical and pharmaceutical facilities. "You get reporting on mobile production facilities … and you say it makes some sense."

Nor did Kerr fault the agency for relying so heavily on an anonymous source whom it could not interview. In this case, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, repeatedly rejected CIA requests to meet Curveball, saying it needed to protect its source. But U.S. and German officials said the BND furnished its file on the defector to U.S. authorities and at times had him answer specific questions from U.S. intelligence.

"Intelligence is often based on information where you can't go back and talk to the source or verify it," Kerr said. "So you turn to the basic questions. 'Does it make sense? Is it logical? Does it appear he could have been at the right place at the right time to know these things?' " The defector met those tests, he said.

One focus of the ongoing investigations is whether the CIA should have known Curveball was not credible. A former U.S. official who has reviewed the classified file said the BND warned the CIA last spring that it had "various problems with the source." Die Zeit, a German newsweekly, first reported the warning last August.

The official said the BND sent the warning after Powell first described the biowarfare trucks in detail to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. It's unclear whether the German warning arrived before the war began on March 20 last year.

"You can imagine the consternation it kicked off," the official said. "It suggested that what [the Germans had] been passing to us was false. They were backing away."

Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, declined to comment Friday on that charge or questions about the case. An official at BND headquarters in Berlin, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also declined to answer questions. "We believed that Iraq had these mobile biological facilities," the official said.

Although previous CIA reports had referred to the biowarfare trucks, Powell's U.N. presentation put them in the spotlight.

Citing "eyewitness accounts," he called them "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq."

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said. He showed what he called "highly detailed and extremely accurate" diagrams of how the trucks were configured, and warned that they could spew enough anthrax or botulinus toxin "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

But Kay, who sought to confirm Curveball's claims in Iraq after the end of major combat, said Powell's account was "disingenuous."

Kay added: "If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name,' as he's describing this, I think people would have laughed us out of court."

Powell assured U.N. diplomats that two other Iraqi sources, who he said were "in a position to know," had corroborated the "eyewitness account." The CIA later said those reports arrived in December 2000 and mid-2002.

Kay said the debriefing files on the pair showed that they never had direct contact with the biowarfare trucks. "None of them claimed to have seen them," he said. "They said they were aware of the mobile program. They had heard there was a mobile program."

CIA files showed that another Iraqi defector, an engineer who had worked with Curveball, specifically denied that they had worked on such facilities, Kay said. Powell did not cite that defector.

The CIA acknowledged last month that a fourth defector whom Powell cited at the U.N., a former major in Iraq's intelligence service, had lied when he said that Baghdad had built mobile research laboratories to test biological agents. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency twice debriefed that defector in early 2002 and reported his claims. But it then concluded that he did not have firsthand information and probably was coached by Chalabi's exile group.

In May 2002, the agency posted a "fabrication notice" on a classified computer network to warn other U.S. intelligence agencies that the defector had lied. But CIA officials said the notice was overlooked, and his information was cited both in Powell's speech and the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to Congress.

The Curveball case began in 1992, when weapons inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission in Iraq, frustrated at their failure to find Iraq's germ weapon factories, wrote an internal report in which they speculated that Baghdad could have hidden small, mobile versions in modified vans or trucks.

Based on that hypothesis, the U.N. weapons hunters and U.S. intelligence analysts studying U-2 spy plane and high-altitude satellite images of Iraq were instructed to watch for a potential "signature" of a germ factory on wheels — pairs of 35-foot trucks, working in tandem, parked parallel, with communications gear, high security and a water source.

Eavesdropping on Iraqi military communications had already proved that they were moving sensitive documents to avoid detection. U.N. inspectors also knew that Iraq used tanker trucks to fill chemical warheads on the battlefield in the 1980s, raising suspicions that it might also have produced chemical or biological agents in trucks.

In 1994, Israel's military intelligence passed word that Iraq was hiding poison factories in commercial trucks — red-and-white "Tip Top Ice Cream" trucks and green moving vans from "Sajida Transport," named for the dictator's wife.

The U.N. inspectors concluded that neither company existed, and some inspectors were skeptical about the whole idea.

Raymond A. Zilinskas, who helped inspect 61 biological facilities in Iraq in 1994, said he had argued that biowarfare trucks were difficult to build, dangerous to operate and hard to hide. "They just didn't make sense from a technical or a security viewpoint," he said.

But the theory gained new credence when Gen. Amir Saadi, then a senior Iraqi weapons official, told U.N. inspectors in August 1995 that he had proposed building germ-producing trucks and other mobile facilities in 1988, chiefly to avoid air attack, but that regime officials rejected his concept as impractical.

Saadi, who became science advisor to Hussein and chief liaison to U.N. inspectors before the war, turned himself in to U.S. forces in Baghdad on April 12, 2003, after telling German TV that Iraq had no illicit weapons. He remains in U.S. custody.

Saadi's 1995 statement rang alarms at the CIA and elsewhere, however. Intelligence reports soon referred to a possible series of three trucks that would operate as a single biological agent factory. One truck would carry fermenters, another would carry mixing and preparation tanks, and the third, equipment to process and store the product.

U.N. inspectors stepped up their search in response. So did Western spy services.

In 1996, Holland's National Intelligence and Security Agency, known as the BVD, sent word that an informant code-named "Fulcrum," a former Iraqi intelligence officer, had supplied a list of government-issued, blue-and-white, sequentially numbered license plates that supposedly were used on the germ trucks. But the inspectors could never find licenses with those numbers.

Then, in March 1997, a U-2 spy plane that the U.S. government operated for the U.N. photographed three or four large box-type trucks parked outside a garage used by Iraq's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat. U.N. teams swooped in — and found that the trucks were filled with construction material.

The U.N. team members then asked headquarters in New York to let them run random roadblocks in Iraq. They also asked for "hot pursuit" authority, with fast cars and helicopters capable of spraying foam on the roads, in case they had to chase a fleeing germ truck. Officials in New York quickly rejected both proposals.

"We were told that was insane," said Scott Ritter, a former chief U.N. inspector who headed a special investigations unit and who served as the U.N. team's liaison to U.S. intelligence. "And they were right."

But the U.N. inspections operation in New York, then headed by Australian diplomat Richard Butler, did approve another plan.

The inspectors long had relied on intelligence from sympathetic governments and dissident groups. Chalabi had lobbied Washington for years to overthrow Hussein and claimed that he had spies inside the Baghdad regime.

In December 1997, Ritter said, he and his deputy, a former British army major attached to the U.N. team, flew to London to ask Chalabi for help. They met for three hours over dinner at Chalabi's Mayfair residence with the influential Iraqi exile and Ahmed Allawi, who headed intelligence operations for the Iraqi National Congress.

"Chalabi outlined what he could do for us," Ritter recalled. "His intelligence guy outlined their sources and said he had people inside the government. They told us they had the run of Iraq. Just tell them what we needed. So we outlined the gaps in our understanding of the Iraqi program, including the mobile bioweapons labs. Basically, we gave them a shopping list."

"They began feeding us information," Ritter said. "We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff flowing in. At first blush, it looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out."

Haider Musawi, an INC media liaison in Baghdad, said in a telephone interview Saturday that he could not confirm the meetings had occurred. Asked about INC ties to Curveball, he replied, "I really can't think of such a defector."

U.S. officials say Curveball apparently showed up in Germany in 1998, but it is unclear how he got there. The Times was unable to ascertain Curveball's real name or his current location.

What is clear is that by 2000, Curveball had provided a vast array of convincing detail about the illicit program he claimed to manage.

He outlined how each office was set up and the names on each door. He described how walls were moved to help hide trucks. He identified several dozen fellow team members — even a lowly aide who rented their cars. He provided diagrams showing how stainless steel tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts were configured on nickel-plated flooring in each truck.

U.N. weapons hunters who returned to Iraq in November 2002 considered the trucks a "high priority," said a former inspector who helped supervise more than 70 raids for evidence of germ weapons in the four months before the war.

They checked every site Curveball had identified, as well as others picked by U.S. intelligence. They tested waste lines in food-testing vans, took samples from refrigerator trucks, and searched for truck parts, blueprints, purchase orders or other evidence in factories, laboratories and elsewhere.

"We didn't find anything," the former inspector said.

After Powell's U.N. speech, inspectors demanded that Baghdad identify every mobile facility it owned.

In letters delivered on March 3 and March 15, just days before the war started, Iraqi officials handed over detailed descriptions, backed by 39 photographs and four videotapes, of mobile disease analysis labs, mobile military morgues, X-ray trucks, military bakery vans, mobile ice factories, refrigerated drug and food transport trucks and other special vehicles. Some had stainless steel equipment that appeared similar to the diagrams Powell had shown the U.N.

After major combat ended, the U.S. forces recovered two suspect trailer trucks in northern Iraq. A CIA report last May 28 concluded that two trucks "probably" were designed to produce lethal toxins in liquid slurry, and Bush said U.S. forces thus had "found" Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

But Pentagon analysts warned that the trucks probably produced hydrogen for artillery weather balloons, and the CIA backtracked. It now says there is "no consensus" on the trucks' use.

During the summer, Kay's investigators visited Curveball's parents and brother in Baghdad, as well as his former work sites. They determined that he was last in his class at the University of Baghdad, not first as he had claimed. They learned he had been fired from his job and jailed for embezzlement before he fled Iraq.

"He was wrong about so much," Kay recalled. "Physical descriptions he gave for buildings and sites simply didn't match reality. Things started to fall apart."

Chalabi, now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, retains strong support in the White House. He was a guest of First Lady Laura Bush at the president's State of the Union address last January, and his organization still receives several hundred thousand dollars a month from the Pentagon to help collect intelligence in Iraq.

Chalabi says he has been unfairly blamed for the failure to find germ trucks or any other unconventional weapons in Iraq since major combat ended. He blames the CIA instead.

"Intelligence people are supposed to do a better job for their country, and their government did not do such a good job," he told CBS' "60 Minutes" in a recent interview. "This is a ridiculous situation."

INC defectors were always accused of having an ax to grind, he said. "So why did the CIA believe them so much?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

- mark 4-04-2004 4:50 pm [link]

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Press Briefing Abroad Aircraft En Route to Cairo, Egypt

U.S. Department of State -- February 23, 2001

I think it's important to point out that for the last 10 years, the policy that the United Nations, the United States has been following, has succeeded in keeping Iraq from rebuilding to the level that it was before. It's an army that's only one-third its original size. And even though they may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds, it is not clear how successful they have been. So to some extent, I think we ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.

- mark 2-08-2004 7:20 am [link]

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa

U.S. Department of State -- February 4, 2001

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. ... And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.
[See also The Memory Hole.]

- mark 2-08-2004 7:12 am [link]

Bush Ordered Aid To Iraqi Military
Center for Nonproliferation Studies -- August 3, 1992

- mark 2-06-2004 12:32 pm [link]




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