Iraq snapshot - February 20, 2013
The Common Ills
Wednesday, February 20, 2013. Chaos and violence continue, the rivalry between State of Law and Iraqiya continues, protests continue, Lawrence Wilkerson continues to be both a public embarrassment and a public menace, and more.
Yesterday we talked about basic history. Someone's ignorance of basic history -- especially basic history broadcast over the public airwaves and entered into the Congressional Record -- really is on them.
Yes, we're talking about Lawrence Wilkerson again, Colin Powell's chief of staff. So Brad Blog whimpered to David Swanson that it wasn't fair to write about Wilkerson without getting a comment from him. I suppose it's not fair to write about Watergate without a rebuttal from G. Gordon Liddy? Wilkerson's comments/lies are all over the place already. But Wilkerson apparently stopped humping his body pillow with Colin Powell's face on it long enough to write and here's some of his latest nonsense:
Several misleading and even spurious bullets and headlines that make strong claims that are not supported in the surrounding narrative. For example, no one ever DID warn Powell about Curveball, in fact quite the opposite. This particular source--billed as an Iraqi engineer who had defected--was George Tenet's--the DCI's--strongest weapon. And incidentally, the title "Curveball" was never heard until well after the 5 Feb presentation.
Your use of INR's assessment of "weak" repeatedly, is weak itself. INR was at the time one of 15 intelligence entities in the US intelligence architecture at the federal level. (Add Israel France, the UK, Jordan, Germany, et al, and of course you get even more). INR's assessments were often viewed--indeed still are--as maverick within that group (and were particularly so viewed by George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Indeed, INR's insistence on putting a footnote in the October 2002 NIE with regard to its doubts about Saddam's having an active nuclear weapons program was only grudgingly acknowledged and allowed by Tenet. And in truth, INR itself concurred in the overall NIE's finding that chems and bios existed (and the NIE was the root document of Powell's 5 Feb presentation).
He can't even lie well. The strongest 'weapon' -- oh, how little boys who can't keep their hands out of their pants in public love to 'weaponize' everything -- the State Dept and Colin Powell had was the INR? What group is the idiot speaking of? He's not speaking of the State Dept. The INR is the report that State produces so if you're the Secretary of State, that's your report. As Greg Thielmann explained it to Harry Shearer (Le Show) last month:
One agency, Colin Powell’s own agency, the intelligence bureau of the State Department, said that the evidence did not support that conclusion. That is, that the evidence showed that Iraq had notreconstituted its nuclear weapons program. And of all the various assessments about chemical weapons, about biological weapons, about missiles, that was the most critical assessment. And the State Department not only dissented, as the State Department would sometimes do, with an asterisk and a one-liner, it was basically a dissent with the entire judgment requiring a lot of words and was on the front page of the executive summary of the estimate. It was on the one-pager that went to the president of the United States. And that should raise alarm bells, not because the State Department intelligence bureau is always right, although I would argue that INR, which is its acronym, INR was more often right than not when we dissented from the majority, but that Colin Powell in particular, who knew or should have known from our memoranda and from his conversations with the head of our bureau the reasons, the detailed reasons why the evidence was not sound behind that conclusion.
Wilkerson wants to talk Curveball? Reality, a defector is rarely an objective source because, pay attention Wilkerson, "defecting" generally requires a reason. Here's The American Prospect on Colin and Curveball:
To review: In February 2003, noted motivational speaker Colin Powell went before the United Nations and delivered a terrifying presentation demonstrating that Iraq was brimming with horrific weapons of mass destruction, all poised to launch at the United States and who knows who else, obviously some time within the next 10 minutes or so, and therefore we just had no choice but to invade. Much of Powell's case was built on the allegations of "Curveball," a person who had left Iraq five years before and whom U.S. intelligence officials had never interrogated. He was interviewed by German intelligence officials, who passed them to the Americans while insisting that they were probably bogus, as indeed they turned out to be. But everything he said was assumed by the administration to be 100 percent true -- Powell even showed computer animations of mobile chemical weapons labs, based on Curveball's invented stories. Powell's show included lots of other falsehoods and intentionally misleading claims, from those "nuclear" aluminum tubes to phantom VX nerve gas to nonexistent long-range missiles (there's a good run-down here).
Let's go to the 60 Minutes II report, originally aired October 15, 2003, entitled "The Man Who Knew: Former Powell Chief of Intelligence and Others Disagree With Evidence Presented to UN for War In Iraq." We'll start with an excerpt to establish who Greg Thielmann is.
SCOTT PELLEY (co-host): In the run-up to the war in Iraq, one moment seemed to be a turning point: the day Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make the case for the invasion. Millions of us watched as he laid out the evidence and reached a damning conclusion: that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. But the man you will hear from tonight says that key evidence in that speech war misrepresented and the public was deceived. Greg Thielmann should know. He had been Powell's own chief on intelligence when it came to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. When you saw Secretary of State Powell make his presentation to the United Nations, what did you think?
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