Bob Drogin and John Goetz provide a detailed account of how the intelligence community was mislead by an Iraqi source known as “Curveball.” These details add to the main story of how US intelligence was used to justify starting the war with Iraq.
The main story has been reported by Walter Pincus in the WaPo and in this blog on July 13, 2004. The main story is this:
• US Intelligence assessments that Iraq was building mobile biological agents labs were used to justify an attack on Iraq
• These assessments were based primarily on reports from an Iraqi defector codenamed “Curveball”
• Curveball was an unreliable source
• Top-level officials in the CIA and the administration ignored warning’s about Curveball’s unreliability.
Drogin and Goetz add significant details:
• The community believed that Iraq still had an active Biological agent development program
• Curveball seemed credible at first
• Analysts soon suspected Curveball’s reliability (In my experience defectors could be valuable sources, however they do have reasons to provide misleading information.)
• How warnings about his reliability were transmitted up the intelligence chain.
As the Senate investigates the prewar use of intelligence, it needs to discover which top level officials ignored and/or suppressed information about Curveball’s unreliability. The Robb-Silberman report claims that there was no political pressure on analysts to change their findings. Does this mean that no elected official bought pressure? That could let the President and Vice President off the hook. Does it mean that head of a department brought pressure? That could let Rumsfeld, Powell and Tenet off the hook. My guess that the neocon appointees in the Office of Special Plans and at the top level of the CIA were the ones who brought pressure and shaped the intelligence assessments to fit their own view of the world.
It doesn’t really let any political official off the hook. They were still responsible for the actions of their appointees and the integrity of intelligence reporting.
That said, we should remember that there were a number of good reasons to believe that Iraq still had an active WMD program. The administration could have based a just war case for attacking Iraq on other factors. Saddam’s atrocities, lies and potential to further destabilize the world would, in my view, have been a just cause. Whether this case would have satisfied the test of last resort and convinced the congress and the American public is another question.
Stay tuned. I plan to mine this story in detail.
NOTE: this posting linked with Beltway Sunday Drive for 11/20/05.
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