'Curveball' identity revealed

[SHRED]

===

The fact that the Bush Administration, in their haste towards invading a sovereign nation, listened to the likes of Ahmed Chalabi and this guy 'Curveball', should be "crimes of incompetence" in and of themselves. It also lays bare the reality that Bush/Cheney desperately wanted to invade.

===


Exclusive: Curveball, the Defector Whose Lies Led to War
March 13, 2007 1:46 PM
Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz Report:



The Iraqi defector known as Curveball, whose fabricated stories of "mobile biological weapons labs" helped lead the U.S. to war four years ago, is still being protected by the German intelligence service, an ABC News investigation has found.

Intelligence sources, who provided ABCNews.com with the first known photo of the man, say he has been resettled in a small town near the Munich headquarters of the German service, which has continued to honor its original commitment made when he fled Iraq in 1999.

Curveball's false tales became the centerpiece of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations in February 2003, even though he was considered an "unstable, immature and unreliable" source by some senior officials at the CIA.

Powell told ABC News he is "angry and disappointed" that he was never told the CIA had doubts about the reliability of the source.

CONTINUED:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/03/exclusive_curve.html


===

[Carl21014]

1. I thought Chalabi was Curveball?

How could I have been so deceived.

[helderheid]

14. same!

:shrug:

[frogcycle]

2. there is something ironic

but fitting when this entire mess is built on something named after a sneaky pitch that fools the batter...

[Ian David]

3. Any chance Curveball is the same guy who said that Quadafi was behind the German disco bombing...

which led Reagan to attack Libya... which led to the Lockerbie bombing?

[berni_mccoy]

4. The U.S. must want this man dead for some reason

otherwise, they would not have leaked his identity.

Can you imagine if foreign news sources started exposing the identity of our secret agents, ... Oh WAIT! our own Gov't and media did that to a CIA agent. Never mind.

[Venus Dog]

7. I totally agree with you

Whoever this person is - I would wager that he's one of ours and dangerous to the BFEE in some way. Another Lee Harvey Oswald, I suspect.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. Perhaps that's secondary, and a terrorist attack in Germany is the real goal.

Just speculation.

[wicket]

5. K & R

:kick:

[leftchick]

6. I don't see any new information here

all I see is a photo with no name attached to it. How the hell do they know who it is?

from two years ago....

<snip>

Curveball's identity has never been publicly revealed. His code name and the role he played in leading U.S. spy agencies to assess that Iraq possessed biological weapons was first described in an article in the Los Angeles Times in March 2004. The commission's report describes Curveball as an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected at a time when U.S. and other spy agencies were desperate for new sources on Iraq's weapons programs, after U.N. inspectors had left the country in 1998. The CIA never had access to Curveball. Instead, he was controlled by Germany's intelligence service, which passed along the information it collected to the United States through the Defense Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon spy agency that handled information from Iraqi defectors.

Between January 2000 and September 2001, the report said, the DIA disseminated "almost 100 reports" from Curveball, who was seen as a valuable new source. Among his most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile labs to manufacture biological weapons and evade detection.

The reports triggered a flurry of escalating U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq, even though the DIA "did not even attempt to determine Curveball's veracity," according to the report. Curveball's claims gained new currency after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Bush administration adopted a policy of preempting international threats and turned its focus to Iraq.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0401-10.htm

[Virginia Dare]

8. This is obviously a deliberate "intelligence" leak...

somebody out there is sending "Curveball" a warning.

[leftchick]

11. yep

he better be in deep cover. he seems to be a walking dead man.

[baldguy]

10. It wasn't "Curveball's" lies that led to the war.

They were merely the excuse the Bush Cabal hung the war on. They knew his stories were bullshit, but they needed some reason to attack Iraq other than "just because".

The lies that started the war are from Bush & his fellow criminals alone.

[blm]

12. Exactly - they would use any means, including planting WMD, and would violate

any War Resolution guidelines, no matter HOW they were written.

The cherry-picked intel, the IWR, the UN resolution, NONE of those sent this country to war - Bush VIOLATING all guidelines for any just war took this nation to war. The others are convenient distractions from Bush's culpability.

[blogslut]

13. Does anyone know

...if Curveball came out of the INC's Information Collection Program?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Iraqi_National_Congress

"The Iraqi National Congress (INC) was created at the behest of the U.S. government for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The INC has been funded since 1992. An unnamed INC offical told the New York Times in 2004 that INC had received $27 million in the last four years.

In May 1991, following the end of Operation Desert Storm, then-President George H.W. Bush signed a presidential finding directing the CIA to create the conditions for Hussein's removal. The hope was that members of the Iraqi military would turn on Hussein and stage a military coup. The CIA did not have the mechanisms in place to make that happen, so they hired the Rendon Group, a PR firm run by John Rendon, to run a covert anti-Saddam propaganda campaign.

"The Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation of a media strategy company (Rendon Group) doing the bidding of the United States government."

<snip>

"Despite this, it was revealed that in March 2004, the Pentagon continued to pay the INC $US340,000 a month for "intelligence collection".<17> "We're still getting good information from the INC ... There are a lot of insurgents that are doing bad things and they have a lot of contacts and making better ones every day," an unnamed Pentagon official claimed.

Knight Ridder reported that the false INC intelligence fed to the US intelligence agencies was also distributed to news outlets in the United States, Britain and Australia. "A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq ... The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons," Knight Ridder reported."

[Roland99]

15. Probably did. $40 million of our taxpayer dollars to those criminals. Here are 2 Hersh articles >>>

THE STOVEPIPE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq’s weapons.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact


The CIA had kicked those lying bastards to the curb in 1996 as they found out the INC was a bunch of worthless liars but the PNAC fucks brought them back into the fold as the INC would tell them what their failed ideology needed to hear.

[blogslut]

16. cool

:)

[NNN0LHI]

17. I wonder if he is related to Geraldo? n/t