Curveball Admits to Fabricating Iraqi WMD Story

[The following is a re-posting of a piece I published in November 2005. I thought it appropriate that I re-post this given the recent news that the Iraqi WMD source known as "Curveball" -- whom Colin Powell heavily relied on during his now-infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council during the run-up to the Iraq Debacle -- has now admitted that he made the whole thing up. In case you're interested, the Iraq War has so far cost American taxpayers $775,000,000,000, resulted to date in the deaths of 4,436 American military personnel, and caused 151,000 Iraqis to lose their lives just in the first three years of the war alone].

Why Does Dick Cheney Like Torture So Much? Because there is no need to "cherry-pick" intelligence when you can grow your own cherries. Atrios sums it up this way:

Bush administration needs evidence to support their war. They use torture techniques designed to extract false confessions to obtain that "evidence," which they then use to sell the war despite knowing full well of the lack of reliability of the information.

But sometimes you still need to cherry-pick, particularly when your goal is to dupe a country into going to war. That's why the Bush Administration had no problem accepting what a source named "Curveball" had to say despite the fact that his German handlers had told U.S. officials that Curveball's information was "not proven" (from The LA Times):

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

But none of that mattered to members of the Bush Regime, and they certainly didn't care that torture produced unreliable results. All they needed to do was simply find some crazy person like Curveball to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, then torture enough people to supplement what Curveball was telling them, and that would be sufficient to take the United States to war against a fourth-rate military power. It didn't matter whether the "intelligence" they used was complete crap -- all that mattered to BushCo was the quality of the propaganda.

The latest edition of Rolling Stone has this long but excellent article on how the Pentagon propaganda machine really works [link no longer active]:

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies."

The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

I guess that if you are going to lie and manipulate a country into a war, the least you could do is manage the war competently. And, needless to say, that is where BushCo really messed the whole thing up.

I mean, if the BushCo/PNAC coalition would have invaded Iraq with enough troops, secured the borders and the ammo dumps, not disbanded the Iraqi army, not tortured pretty much everyone they got their hands on and then took pictures of it, etc., then this country wouldn't have cared one bit if the dominant rationale for invasion was made up out of whole cloth. Success has a way of making people forget about stuff like that.

Unfortunately for BushCo, unparalleled expertise in prevarication, press manipulation, and discrediting of political enemies could not overcome simple idiocy.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall asks an important question:

This is one of those media questions for which there is no real way to provide a concrete answer. But it is at least worth asking: How many of the stories coming out now under the very broad heading of botched or manipulated intelligence could have been reported and written at more or less any time over the last two years? I suspect the answer is, the great majority of them.

They're getting written now because the president's poor poll numbers make him a readier target.

I know I'm not saying anything most of you don't know. And better late than never, of course. But all working reporters and editors should consider what that says about the profession.