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Next up: The 9/11 commission report is expected out next week. Unlike Dan Darling, who has read all 511 pages of the SSCI report on Iraq Intelligence, I still have about 250 pages to go [fortunately many of them are blacked out].
Meantime, Newsweek reports on Curve Ball showing up hungover for a meeting with the lone US official who ever debriefed him. How many meetings did the US official have with the chief source for the administration's claims about Iraq's "mobile biological weapons labs," which turned out not to be? One.
The more he read, the more uneasy he became. In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover."
He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."
Why isn't the Committee telling us why "The Powers That Be" weren't interested in whether Curve Ball was credible, or as the case evidently was, distinctly not credible? Anyhow, as a friend pointed out last night, for the vast majority of the American public, are they really going to distinguish between the administration and the CIA, or will they see a report damning the CIA as ultimately implicating the administration?