November 21, 2005
L.A. Times scoop: CIA duped by Iraqi visa seeker on chemical/biological weapons threat
The bulk of the pre-war case for invading Iraq rested not on the threat Saddam Hussein might use nuclear weapons (the “mushroom cloud” made famous by Condolezza Rice), but on the administration’s claim that he possessed chemical and biological weapons (CBW). Ex-New York Times reporter Judith Miller staked her reputation on reporting those threats and embedded herself with the special units searching for CBW in the early days of the war. At one point, she even reported the unit uncovered a chemical weapons cache – a report that later turned out to be false.
That’s why Sunday's Los Angeles Times report by reporters Bob Drogin and John Goetz (a freelancer) is so significant. They revealed that German intelligence agents repeatedly told their U.S. counterparts BEFORE THE WAR that their source for information about Iraq's CBW program – an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball – didn’t have a clue and was completely unreliable.
From the article: “CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called ‘water cooler gossip’ into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. Curveball's motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa.”
Why did the Bush administration believe him? Near the end of the lengthy story, the Bush administration is castigated for never correcting the President’s comments in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq harbored chemical weapons or his subsequent statement that some had been found. But the story’s upshot is that this bit of false pre-war intelligence was largely the CIA’s fault. Perhaps when Congress investigates this element of the story during hearings next week on prewar intelligence, they’ll find out whether folks in the White House (or, more likely, in the Vice President’s office) were ordering up the intelligence they wanted to hear. Thanks to Curveball, the CIA had the goods to deliver.
Meanwhile, Colin Powell, who delivered the now infamous February 2003 speech at the United Nations justifying the U.S. rush to war, was once again left out on a limb defending his honor by claiming he was out of the loop. He said that he was unaware of a debate within the intelligence community about the veracity of Curveball’s claims.
There have been huge domestic ramifications to the false claim that the U.S. faces a significant threat from bioweapons experts abroad (most accounts of the still unsolved anthrax murders of October 2001 suggest the perpetrator isn't a foreigner, but someone who had access to U.S. stockpiles of weaponized anthrax). The failure to find and arrest the real perpetrator has left the American people fearful and politically vulnerable. The CIA report, based on evidence from serial fabricators like Curveball, gave the Bush administration the ammunition it needed to play to those fears and take the country to war.
It also gave the President and Congress the political capital needed to channel billions of dollars into researching drugs and vaccines for bioweapon threats like anthrax and smallpox, which, from a public health point of view, pose no threat to Americans. And, it would now appear, that research was equally meaningless from a national security point of view.
What a waste of human capital. Over the past four years, scientists sidetracked into studying anthrax could have been addressing the infectious diseases that actually pose a threat to Americans and the developing world – like tuberculosis, malaria and avian flu.