Goofballs

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

I wish I could make up stuff like this.

As I've heard it said, "Truth is stranger than fiction."

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US relied on 'drunken liar' to justify war

'Crazy' Iraqi spy was full of misinformation, says report

Edward Helmore in New York
Sunday April 3, 2005
The Observer

An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq.

According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends.

The defector, given the code-name Curveball by the CIA, has emerged as the central figure in the corruption of US intelligence estimates on Iraq. Despite considerable doubts over Curveball's credibility, his claims were included in the administration's case for war without caveat.

According to the report, the failure of US spy agencies to scrutinise his claims are the 'primary reason' that they 'fundamentally misjudged the status of Iraq's [biological weapons] programs'. The catalogue of failures and the gullibility of US intelligence make for darkly comic reading, even by the standards of failure detailed in previous investigations. Of all the disproven pre-war weapons claims, from aluminium centrifuge tubes to yellow cake uranium from Niger, none points to greater levels of incompetence than those found within the misadventures of Curveball.

- tinyurl.com/6pqbb

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Libya May Be Hiding Germs, Chemicals, Report Warns

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 1, 2005
the complete article

WASHINGTON - Since entering a deal to abandon its nuclear program at the end of 2003, the Libyan government has been less than forthcoming about the scope of its biological and chemical weapons programs.

That is one conclusion in a massive report released yesterday by a bipartisan commission originally tasked to examine the failure of the American intelligence community to accurately predict the extent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. The 10-person Silberman-Robb commission, chaired by federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman and a former Democratic senator from Virginia, Charles Robb, concluded in blunt language that, "the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

The harsh judgment of America's intelligence analysts echoes the critiques of both the Iraq Survey Group, commissioned by the CIA to find the weapons that President Bush said were in Iraq, and a hard-hitting Senate Select Committee on Intelligence review issued last summer.

Unlike those reports, though, the commission provides a more comprehensive assessment of America's intelligence on other targets. While the unclassified version of the report left blank a section on America's information regarding Iran and North Korea's nuclear program, the classified version is said to find America's grip on both countries' weapons programs severely lacking. "Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the report found.

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Seems like Globocop needs a chipset replaced.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Views > March 10, 2005

The Clash of the Cults
By Salim Muwakkil

"The Power of Nightmares" neatly demolishes the notion of a menacing terrorist network, threatening mayhem at every airport.

The war on terrorism declared by the United States on radical Islamists is little more than a proxy battle in a war between two cults.

That is the provocative theory emerging from two award-winning investigative journalists from both sides of the Atlantic: Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New Yorker, and Adam Curtis, a well-known British documentary filmmaker and producer for the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC).

They are making the case that current animosities between the West and the Islamic world are being fueled by the narrow agendas of two cults: American neoconservatives and al Qaeda.

It was Hersh’s exposé on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in The New Yorker in April 2004 that essentially forced CBS to air its “60 Minutes” program on the atrocities, which it had been sitting on for weeks. A veteran reporter with hard-earned access to the internal dynamics of foreign policy formation, Hersh also has closely followed the rise of the neoconservative ideologues that now dominate the U.S. foreign policy apparatus.

At a recent speech before the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York, Hersh said, “The amazing thing is, we’ve been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neoconservatives have somehow grabbed the government.” He didn’t go into the whys and wherefores of this takeover (he has done so, exhaustively, in a New Yorker piece published May 5, 2003), but he relayed his distress at the results.

“You do have to wonder what democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way,” he told the Synagogue crowd.

Hersh has been chronicling this takeover in a series of New Yorker articles, the latest of which was a January 24 piece about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s takeover of intelligence functions usually handled by the CIA.

Hersh argues that the neocons’ worldview was shaped in large part by the theories of the late Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in the ’40s and ’50s. Strauss believed the world to be a hostile place where democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, Hersh writes, and where those in power often have to deceive their own uncomprehending citizens in order to protect the nation.

He warns that this coterie of Straussians is taking America down a dangerous path that will be hard to reverse. The major features of this path are neocolonialism in the guise of evangelical democracy and hostility to Islam.

Through the influence of this cult, most Americans have been convinced that the modern West is being seriously threatened by a parade of ruthless Islamist terrorists. The Islamists who fit that description are grateful for this grandiose image: the larger their shadow, the greater the terror.

But this notion of a menacing monolith, implacably opposed to Western modernism and threatening mayhem at every airport, is neatly demolished in Curtis’ BBC film, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. The three-hour documentary, which first aired on the BBC last October and was repeated in January, makes a compelling argument that much of what we think we know about international terrorism is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and exploited by politicians.

- www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_rss/the_clash_of_the_cults/

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Maureen Dowd: Curveball the goofball

07:47 PM CDT on Thursday, April 7, 2005

WASHINGTON – I had an editor once whose wife was in the Audubon Society. There were a lot of articles about birds in that newspaper.

I had an editor once who loved fishing. There were a lot of articles about fish in that newspaper.

Organizations organically respond to please the boss. Bosses naturally surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear.

When King Lear's favorite daughter spoke frankly to him, and refused to fawn like her sisters, she was instantly banished. Insincerity pays.

It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon.

As the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, put it: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Huh? That's like an investigation into steroids in baseball that looks only at the drug companies, not the players who muscled up.

We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn't find any.

This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not answered the basic question: How did the White House and Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in trouble for it? If your kid lied and hid stuff from you to do something he thought would be great, then wouldn't admit it and blamed someone else, he'd be punished – even if his adventure worked out all right for him.

When the "values" president and his aides do it, they're rewarded. Condoleezza Rice was promoted to secretary of state. Stephen Hadley, Condi's old deputy, was promoted to national security adviser. Bob Joseph, a national security aide who helped shovel the uranium hooey into the State of the Union address, is becoming an under secretary of state. Paul Wolfowitz, who painted the takeover of Iraq as such a cakewalk that our troops went in without the proper armor or backup, will run the World Bank. George Tenet, who ran the C.I.A. when Al Qaeda attacked and when Saddam's mushroom cloud gained credibility, got the Medal of Freedom.

Then the president appoints a compliant Democrat and a complicit conservative judge to head an inquiry set up to let the president off the hook.

Please, no more pantomime investigations. We all know what happened. Dick Cheney and the neocons had a fever to sack Saddam. Mr. Cheney and Rummy persuaded W., "the Man," that it was the manly thing to do. Everybody feigned a 9/11 connection. Ahmad Chalabi conned his neocon pals, thinking he could run Iraq if he gave the Bush administration the smoking gun it needed to sell the war.

Suddenly Curveball appeared, the relative of an aide to Mr. Chalabi, to become the lone C.I.A. source with the news that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile facilities hidden from arms inspectors and Western spies. Curveball's obviously sketchy assertions ended up in Mr. Tenet's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and Colin Powell's U.N. speech in February 2003, laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.

Curveball's information was used to justify the war even though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that Curveball did not speak English.

By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators."

But Curveball's crazy assertions had traction because they were what the White House wanted to hear.

The report warns the president to watch out for the "headstrong" intelligence agencies. If only the commission had concerned itself with headstrong officials at a higher level. Then its 601 pages would be worth reading.

©The New York Times Co., 2005