My turn! (bogus war-intel related)

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Anyone see the exhaustive article in the LA Times today completely calling out the CIA and their main/only source on Iraqi WMD related program activities?

check it out here

page nine is especially juicy when they get into the real background of their source, code-named "Curveball".

If it wasn't already: Bush

Can we riot in the streets yet???

aegis

I only have skimmed it so far, but I liked these:

1994

Curveball gets job

Curveball is hired out of engineering school at Baghdad University to work at the Chemical Engineering and Design Center. He says he is first in his class, but records later show that he was last in his class.

and

Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi.

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If there's one complementary thing to say about the current American regime, its that they really turned bullying and bamboozeling into a beautiful poetry. Young meglomaniacs will be studying their moves for decades or centuries to come.

motown67

I won't post my big long write ups on Iraq and WMD, but here's the main points people need to know.

In 1995 Hussein Kamal head of Iraq's WMD program defected to Jordan. He told the U.S. and everyone else that Iraq had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and just kep the means to produce WMD in the future. He also said that Iraq had an elaborate deception campaign to hide its WMD program from U.N. inspectors. Everyone jumped on the deception campaign as proof that Iraq wasn't cooperating with UN resolutions after the Gulf War but didn't believe the claim that Iraq didn't have WMD anymore.

In 1998 U.N. inspectors left Iraq. There were some unaccounted for weapons left over from the Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq war but they had basically destroyed Iraq's WMD and nuclear program. The sticking point with the U.S. was the unaccounted for weapons. The big program with this was that the U.S. never knew how much WMD Iraq had to begin with. They just knew Iraq hadn't accounted for everything yet. What they ignored is that most of this WMD had a limited shelf life and much of it would be no good by time Bush came into office.

The biggest issue was after the UN inspectors left the CIA and U.S. intelligence just assumed that Iraq went back to producing WMD. They actually had NO solid evidence, it was pure speculation on their part.The U.N. inspectors were THE main source of intelligence for the U.S. within Iraq. They had no other human intelligence within the country.

Another change happened in around 2002 when the intelligence went from saying that Iraq might have WMD to saying that not were they sure that Iraq had WMD, but they started claiming that Iraq had a larger arsenal and capability than before the Gulf War. Agan, this not based upon hard evidence, but speculation and a series of Iraqi defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress, all of which turned out to be lying or exaggerating.

The two pieces of evidence used to claim that Iraq was making WMD again were that Iraq had mobile WMD labs and that it was producing unmanned aircraft that could deliver WMD. Again, these were based upon Iraqi defectors provided by the INC who turned out to be lying, exaggerating, gave contrdictory reports, etc.

In the end, the Senate Intelligence Committee report from July 2004 and the Robb-Silbermann report on U.S. intelligence on WMD both said that U.S. intelligence on Iraq was crap, exaggerated, speculative, etc. The U.S. didn't have any reliable sources, but went from Iraq hardly has anything because of U.N. inspectors, to Iraq has more than they had before the Gulf War pretty much because they had an anti-Iraq bias and would believe any little bit of news they got.