LAT: Iraqi Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War (aka Curveball)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-curveball28mar28,1,764957.story?coll=la-home-headlines

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.

<snip>

Only later, U.S. officials said, did the CIA learn that the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides

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.

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 been passing to us was false. They were backing away."

Perhaps BushCo thinks that is adequate fact-checking.

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."

have given anyone a clue?

NT!

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.

<snip>

"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."

<snip>

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.

It really wouldn't matter who told them what. The issue had been decided, end of story.

The intelligence community normally does not make mistakes like this.

Bush ordered them to support his WMD case and Iraqi terrorism case NO MATTER WHAT! And the pressure to do that -- without any real proof -- caused them to do all sorts of stupid things.

snip>

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."

snip>

the Times-Picayune (or as we like to call it, the TP) picked up the LA Times story and put it on the Front Page of the Sunday paper.

Just another nail in the fraud machine's coffin.

in all the Clarke-Condi stuff even though it's as darning as anything on the administration's "intelligence".

This compliments the other chimp scandals well.