Report adds fuel to 'war manipulation' debate

A massive report in the Los Angeles Times has appeared to add further evidence to critics charging the Bush administration with manipulating evidence to promote the Iraq invasion in 2003. Once again the Iraqi defector known as "Curveball" takes front and center. "The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq," Bob Drogin and John Goetz wrote on Nov. 20. They also revealed that "An investigation by the Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the US, Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that US bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed." Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with the Times that they had warned US intelligence authorities that the source known only as Curveball never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so. "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," the reporters related. "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." A senior German intelligence official said: "This was not substantial evidence. 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. Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar US accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The Times noted: "The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Vice President Dick Cheney recently called such claims reprehensible and pernicious." The White House, the reporters charged, "ignored evidence gathered by UN weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years. "At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion." The senior officer who supervised Curveball's case said that watching secretary of state Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war before the United Nations, "We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven... It was not hard intelligence."