Below is an excerpt, (e.g. first page of a four page article), from and
article that appears in todays Washington post. It had to do with the
Secretary of State Collin Powell's address before the UN Security
Council regarding WMD. As I recall, former CIA directory George
J. Tenet and former US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponta were sitting
directly behind Collin Powell as he delivered the US justification for
war against Iraq to the UN.
In my mind a question arises whether the person nicknamed "cureball" was
acting alone, or on behalf of some other organization or country.
A troubling thing about the CIA intelligence failure is that operatives
within the CIA new that shaky intelligence was finding its way into
drafts to be released to the world, and efforts were made to warn
George Tenet, but George Tenet never seem to have received the warnings
from those working under him. The question then become who was
intercepting the warning that should have found there way to George Tenet?
You can click on the link below for the full article, but it may require
free registration with the Washington Post.
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Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006; Page A01
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.
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.
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."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the
CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn
on the television and there it was, again."
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence
failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by
former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most
spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly
drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ
factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.
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."
The warnings triggered debates within the CIA but ultimately made no
visible impact at the top, current and former intelligence officials
said. In briefing Powell before his U.N. speech, George Tenet, then the
CIA director, personally vouched for the accuracy of the mobile-lab
claim, according to participants in the briefing. Tenet now says he did
not learn of the problems with Curveball until much later and that he
received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.
"No one mentioned Drumheller, or Curveball," Lawrence B. Wilkerson,
Powell's chief of staff at the time, said in an interview. "I didn't
know the name Curveball until months afterward."
Curveball's role in shaping U.S. declarations about Iraqi bioweapons
capabilities was first described in a series of reports in the Los
Angeles Times, and later in a March 2005 report by a presidential
commission on U.S. intelligence failures regarding allegations that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Drumheller's first-hand
accounts add new detail about the CIA's embrace of a source whose
credibility was already unraveling.
More than a year after Powell's speech, after an investigation that
extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a
con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge
into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on
wheels.
But in the fall of 2002, Curveball was living the life of an important
spy. A Baghdad native whose real name has never been released, he was
residing in a safe house in Germany, where he had requested asylum three
years earlier. In return for immigration permits for himself and his
family, the Iraqi supplied Germany's foreign intelligence service with
what appeared to be a rare insider's account of one of President Saddam
Hussein's long-rumored WMD programs.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/24/AR2006062401081.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
or
http://tinyurl.com/o8ylr
#-------------------------------------------
Regards,
LelandJ
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