Sunday, June 25, 2006

Mendacity v. Incompetence

Ahhh, Curveball. Our mobile germ lab man in Iraq. The "alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi". You'd think we could have done better, but hey, you go with the bullshit you have, not the nonsense you wish you had. Was it mendacity or just outright incompetence? You make the call! Washington Post (06.25.06):
"In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare." Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
"Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph. Lo and behold!! "A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: 'We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.'" "Drumheller, who is writing a book about his experiences, described in extensive interviews repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to problems with the defector, code-named Curveball, in the days before the Powell speech." "Other warnings came prior to President Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. In the same speech that contained the now famous '16 words' on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium, Bush spoke in far greater detail about mobile labs 'designed to produce germ warfare agents.'" Shooter too, was out there pushing the hell out of the same nonsense. George, last November: "Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs." If you believe that, you're a chump. These guys knew exactly what they were doing.

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