Posted on 02/15/2016 6:12:20 PM PST by VitacoreVision
If any doubt remained that the U.S. and British governments’ case for invading Iraq was based almost entirely on lies, the Guardian has just put such doubt to rest. The British newspaper published a story based on interviews with Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code name “Curveball,” in which Janabi admitted “that nearly every word he had told his interrogators from Germany’s secret service, the BND, was a lie.”
The tales Janabi wove about Saddam Hussein’s supposed mobile biological weapons program formed the basis of much of then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council in which he laid out the case for war against Iraq, saying:
We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails….
The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died.
He reported that when UNSCOM was in the country and inspecting, the biological weapons agent production always began on Thursdays at midnight because Iraq thought UNSCOM would not inspect on the Muslim Holy Day, Thursday night through Friday. He added that this was important because the units could not be broken down in the middle of a production run, which had to be completed by Friday evening before the inspectors might arrive again.
In fact, says the Guardian, “everything [Janabi] had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program was a flight of fantasy,” yet the U.S. government swallowed it whole despite the fact that prior to Powell’s speech, according to Janabi, “he had not met a U.S. official, let alone been interviewed by one.” (At the time he was living in Germany, having been granted asylum; he and his family, with an assist from the BND, have since become German citizens and have remained in the country.) Moreover, Janabi had already been exposed as a liar in 2000, so any allegations he made should have been considered highly suspect. Nevertheless, there was Powell, telling the entire world that Iraq was teeming with weapons of mass destruction, using “diagrams that [Janabi] knew had been prepared from his fraudulent descriptions.” The paper aptly dubs Janabi’s snow job “one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence.”
The path to success was, however, made much smoother for Janabi by the fact that the Bush administration, along with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, so desperately wanted to find an excuse to invade Iraq that it grasped at the flimsiest of straws that could be used to build its case. It is known, for example, that both the U.S. and U.K. governments tried to provoke Saddam into firing the first shot in the war and that the Blair government had, in the words of BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, “sexed up” its intelligence dossier supposedly proving the existence of Iraq’s WMD incontrovertibly. As the so-called Downing Street Memo put it, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A ready-made source of such phony intelligence was simply too good to pass up.
That these governments were looking for “facts” to support their war policy is evident from Janabi’s statements to the Guardian. Janabi says that he “thought his story about the mobile trucks had been discounted” in 2000 after both German and British intelligence confronted him with evidence to contradict his assertions, at which point he readily admitted he had been wrong. He did not speak to his handlers again until May 2002, when they began asking him questions unrelated to the alleged mobile biological weapons labs. Then, in January 2003, they suddenly began questioning him about the mobile labs again — “the first time they had talked to me about this since 2000,” Janabi said. The paper writes that Janabi “says it was clear to him that the drums of war were beating ever louder” at that time. The next month everything Janabi had related about the supposed mobile labs showed up in Powell’s speech.
What else can one conclude but that the American and British governments sought out Janabi’s “intelligence” to bolster their case for war, ignoring all evidence to the contrary? They were certainly not above using other suspect intelligence for the same purpose, such as the obviously phony documents that supposedly proved that Saddam had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Further evidence that this is precisely what happened has been provided by Tyler Drumheller, who was the chief of CIA covert operations in Europe at the time of Powell’s presentation. Drumheller, who also saw through the yellowcake documents and reported that Iraq had no WMD program, told the Guardian that “right up to the night of Powell’s speech” he had been warning then-CIA Director George Tenet that Janabi’s intelligence was unreliable but (obviously) was ignored.
The newspaper adds:
[Drumheller] 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? This is all we have!’”
Asked whether Powell … could have made a public case for war without Curveball, he said: “Not at the time they did ... it would have been a lot less dramatic and there would have been a lot more debate in Congress in the U.S. than if you have a source who says, for example, they can drop anthrax over the city of London.”
Tenet has denied that Drumheller ever made an official warning to CIA headquarters, insisting that he only found out about Janabi’s unreliability in 2005. Powell, meanwhile, is calling for an investigation into why the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency failed to inform him of Janabi’s unreliability prior to his speech.
The use of defector intelligence with no corroboration is not accepted practice at intelligence agencies, argues Carne Ross. Ross, who says he “was Britain’s Iraq expert at the U.N. Security Council and responsible for liaison with the weapons inspectors” during the years just prior to the Iraq war, writes that because “defectors had a powerful incentive to exaggerate the nature of Iraq’s development of WMD,” they were considered “the least convincing sources” of intelligence. Therefore, their allegations, as with all other intelligence, were always “subjected to rigorous cross-checking before inclusion in overall analyses.” “In the years I worked on the subject (1997-2002),” Ross maintains, “the picture produced by this method was very clear: there was no credible evidence of substantial stocks of WMD in Iraq.”
Ross continues:
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 U.N. 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. This was a subtle process, elaborated from report to report, in such a way that allowed officials themselves to believe that they were not deliberately lying — more editing, perhaps, or simplifying for public presentation.
… Others of my former colleagues in the [Ministry of Defense] 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.
It is probably too much to expect any Bush or Blair administration officials to pay the price for their deliberate deceit. Indeed, as Ross points out, “We can expect that those who constructed it — Tony Blair, Dick Cheney et al. — will now amend their usual arguments to suggest that they were innocently misled by evidence such as Curveball’s.” They will also no doubt fall back on the old standby that the world is better off without Saddam — something that Curveball himself is counting on to salvage his reputation, telling the Guardian that while he is “very sad” about the tens of thousands of Iraqis civilians who have been killed as a direct result of his lies, “there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq.”
Curveball, have you seen any news out of Egypt lately?
Yes there was a reason to go into Afghanistan, but not to stay. GWB talked about nation building, but I always suspected that the CIA Drug Running operation was looking for a new source of supply.
Thank you for your post. I cannot believe the leftwing lunacy I’m seeing on FR nowadays. Everyone’s intelligence services, EVERYONE’s, even those nations that did not support the war, all believed that Saddam had WMDs.
As much as I dislike Jeb and some of the things W did politically, I’ve never faulted him for acting on the Intel we had at the time. We DO know that Saddam was finacially supporting terrorism in the Middle East. We could not allow Saddam’s regime to continue after 12 years of consistent violations of the UN peace treaty and obfuscating weapons inspectors - then when it was imminent that we were really going to invade him, all of a sudden Saddam wanted to let the inspectors see some stuff?
Again, thank you for posting actual history and what everyone believed at the time.
The first war against Iraq was because they invaded Kuwait Iraqi military was decimated and many of their Russian trainers were killed. The UN established a no fly zone to keep Iraq contained. For 12+ years Hussian thumbed his nose at the UN as resolution after resolution was disobeyed by Iraq. I forgot how many he ignored. All of this before the UN ordered the invasion which was supported by most Mid-eastern nations. People of the land are forgetting what all went on. WMD was not even the main reason for taking them out. They were major supporters of terrorism. Every time a Palestinian mother gave up a child as a bomber, it was Iraq who paid mother the $10,000 for sacrificing her child - not Arafat. They were instigators and enablers for terrorism.
We didn’t learn a thing from the Soviets’ experience in Afghanistan.
Just total crap. The intelligence was reviewed by several panels and no lies were documented. All the Democrats preceding Bush also pointed to Sadam’s WMD efforts. WMDs were found.
You have to be a code-pink mentally defective to believe that this was a lie.
Thanks for that info.
I remember Gulf I. The decision to go in the second time without a clear-eyed assessment of the long-term effect of an invasion was a mistake.
That is interesting . I never impute the sins of a grand father to his grand sons. This research is really late coming. But it may be genetic that they attack the wrong country, like Iraq.
I had grandfather shot out side a bar in Cripple Cree Colorado. He successfully dodged WWI and died from smoking “roll your own” cigarets. My great grandfather was US marshal and shot many real bad. But I am a good boy.
May not have inherited the sins of their father, but they sure inherited the money. Be safe.
Really?? What WMDs were found? Nukes? war heads, missiles? When? where? No one knows that— help us. ( don’t give us some old crap 20 year old leaking crap in the ground after years of searching.)
Thanks. That was interesting stuff you found. jebbie BUSH is a wimp.
“You know I can’t think of anyone on FR that wasn’t convinced at one time that all the truck convoys and flights out of Iraq and into Syria were for the transfer of the non existent WMD’s.”
What did they think about the administration who supposedly didn’t want WMD to fall into the wrong hands not make a big deal about it? I mean, that was my question about it. Does anyone know?
Freegards
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/10/16/new-york-times-reports-wmd-found-in-iraq
But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.
http://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/
I expect drooling lefties to adhere to code pink not reasoned freepers.
I asked you not to present that again. It is all junk. There were no real WMD in Iraq. But let us assume there were. Just for discussion. Do we invade countries who have them? I want you to go first. Here is a short list. China, Russia, Britain, Pakistan. India, France,Isreal, South Korea, North Korea , Japan. Why dont you self fund and head up the invasion. I personally think they are sovereign countries ( Like we are) and they can do the hell what they want. Which one first— Do you think?
I came here to say that.
SH had WMD’s at one point. He moved them out before the war started.
Why GWB and Powell refuse to acknowledge that baffles me.
Bump for good reference to the truth....
BS and more BS.
EVERYBODY thought Saddam had more weapons then he really did.
President Clinton stated in February 1998:
Iraq admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production....
Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq’s remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits....
It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons....
Now, let’s imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal....
President Clinton ~ 1998
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33082-2004May17.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4997808/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/bomb-said-holddeadly-sarin-gas-explodes-iraq/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/05/17/sarin-mustard-gas-discovered-separately-in-iraq.html
Yeah..didn’t exist.
Right.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33082-2004May17.html
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4997808/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/bomb-said-holddeadly-sarin-gas-explodes-iraq/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2004/05/17/sarin-mustard-gas-discovered-separately-in-iraq.html
Nothing to worry about, doesn’t exist.
Are you calling George W. Bush a liar?
George W. Bush: Iraq had no WMDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soohikNdbWs
Watch it for yourself.
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