Former CIA man: bogus WMD claims remained in war case despite doubts about curveball

Hot on the heals of Santorum's furphy headline grab, about 500 pre-1991 chemical weapon shells, is another WMD story.

WaPo has carried a piece about former CIA European Operations Chief, Tyler Drumheller, who claims to have vetted Powell's 2003 Security Council speech draft, determining that the references to alleged mobile labs, based on the claims of a source known as curveball, were suspect and should be removed.

Despite this account, the speech obviously went ahead with the allegations included. Indeed, Goss' subsequent investigation even yielded testemony from former director George Tenet denying that there were any doubts about curveball prior to the war.

"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.

The combination of the flimsy source, this testemony, and the other instances of OSP stove-piping and cherry-picking from the Iraqi National Congress, inclines me to see incompetence and deceit.

I mean, it's same thing that happened with the pre-existing IAEA monitoring of the aluminium tubes prior to the war. In that case, it was known beforehand that the allegations were wrong (the tubes were assessed as inappropriate for centrifuge), yet Rice et al continued to sell the story as a "nuclear smoking gun".

So much for the talking point that "...the intelligence community agreed Iraq had WMD."