W's 'smoking gun' Curveball comes clean

Lest we forget the deceit and ignominy of the Dubya years...

...Plus a scandalous new revelation about the real reason for Russian spy babe Anna Chapman's deportation from the U.S.!

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion

By Jonathan Owen

April 1, 2012 | The Independent

A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999.  His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true.  When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."

Another revelation in the series is the real reason why the FBI swooped on Russian spy Anna Chapman in 2010. Top officials feared the glamorous Russian agent wanted to seduce one of US President Barack Obama's inner circle. Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI's head of counterintelligence, reveals how she got "closer and closer to higher and higher ranking leadership... she got close enough to disturb us".

The fear that Chapman would compromise a senior US official in a "honey trap" was a key reason for the arrest and deportation of the Russian spy ring of 10 people, of which she was a part, in 2010. "We were becoming very concerned," he says. "They were getting close enough to a sitting US cabinet member that we thought we could no longer allow this to continue." Mr Figliuzzi refuses to name the individual who was being targeted.

Several British spies also feature in the programme, in the first time that serving intelligence officers have been interviewed on television.  In contrast to the US intelligence figures, the British spies are cloaked in darkness, their voices dubbed by actors.  BBC veteran reporter Peter Taylor, who worked for a year putting the documentary together, describes them as "ordinary people who are committed to what they do" and "a million miles" from the spies depicted in film. He adds: "What surprised me was the extent to which they work within a civil service bureaucracy. Everything has to be signed off... you've got to have authorisation signed in triplicate."

Would-be agents should abandon any Hollywood fantasies they may have, says Sonya Holt at the CIA recruitment centre. "They think it's more like the movies, that they are going to be jumping out of cars and that everyone carries a weapon... Yes we're collecting intelligence but we don't all drive fast cars. You're going to be writing reports; you're in meetings so it's not always that glamorous image of what you see in the movies."

Hitchens: America's identity crisis with Obama

Identity Crisis
There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race.

By Christopher Hitchens
January 7, 2008 | Slate.com

To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an aging and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been "our first black president."

Or perhaps not. Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.

[Hitchens, who is a smart guy, sounds deliberately naïve here. Americans consider Obama black because he can't "pass" for anything else. It's really that simple. Unfortunately, black people (with the exception of Michael Jackson) don't get to choose their appearance the way they select their race on an application form. Nor do most "multiracial" black Americans enjoy the kind of friendly publicity of Tiger Woods , who uses the media spotlight to explain his racial makeup in exhaustive detail. Colin Powell put the issue succinctly, "In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you're black." Blacks and whites alike look with suspicion on anyone who goes to great lengths to assert his "unapparent" racial makeup. "Methinks he doth protest too much," I say of Tiger Woods and those like him. – J]

One can't exactly say that Sen. Obama himself panders to questions of skin color. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race—Alan Keyes—accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves! Obama's decision to be light-hearted—and perhaps light-skinned—about this was a milestone in itself. But are we not in danger of emulating Keyes' insane mistake every time we bang on about the senator's pigmentation? If you wanted a "black" president or vice president so much, you could long ago have turned out en masse for Angela Davis—also the first woman to be on a national ticket—or for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. So, why didn't you? Could it have been the politics?

[People like Obama's politics, and his personality. I'm the only one saying we should vote for Obama just because he's black ;-) In fact, for most Americans Obama's race is just gravy, the chance to make history. Voters really like his youth, optimism, and his tendency to stay above the political fray. – J]

Last week happened to be the week that the nation of Kenya—birthplace of Obama's father—was convulsed by a political war that contained ghastly overtones of violent and sadistic tribalism. It would sound as absurd to a Kenyan to hear praise for a black candidate as it would sound to most of my European readers to hear a recommendation of a "great white hope." A white visitor to Kenya might not be able to tell a Kikuyu from a Luo at a glance, but a Kenyan would have no such difficulty. The time is pretty much past, in our country, when a Polish-American would not vote for a candidate with a German name or when Sharks and Jets were at daggers drawn, but this is all because (to borrow from Ernest Renan's definition of a nation) people agreed to forget a lot of things as well as to remember a number of things. So, which are we doing presently?

Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its Web site. Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant"—a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—this bizarre outfit describes itself as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" and speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric." Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch—the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo—which announces cheerily that "Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money." Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Gov. Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes, and the site offers a volume called Bad Girls of the Bible: Exploring Women of Questionable Virtue, which I have added to my cart, but nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.

All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character.

The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. The sickly canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. has led to a crude rewriting of history that obliterates the great black and white secularists—Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther—who actually organized the March on Washington. It has also allowed a free pass to any demagogue who can manage to get the word reverend in front of his name. The white voters who subconsciously make the allowance that black folks sure love to hear their preachers are not only patronizing their black brothers and sisters but also helping to empower white ministers or deacons who make the same pitch, from Jimmy Carter to Mike Huckabee. The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, "uplift," and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

['Sickly canonization'? That's harsh. MLK was imprisoned and later assassinated because of his struggle for racial equality. Here Hitchens' provocative iconoclasm (which includes going after Mother Teresa) reaches too far. – J]

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Q&A with Powell, and reflections on Petraeus

I deleted the Q&A with Powell that I didn't think was as interesting, and focused on the questions on Iraq and terrorism. You can follow the link and read the whole interview if you want.

As one active-duty general gives his report on Iraq today, let's read what a retired top-ranking U.S. general has to say about the success of the 'surge.' And let's keep in mind that behind closed doors, Powell says he "did his duty" by privately expressing his objections to President Bush about the plan to invade Iraq -- yet in public he towed the Administration's line without expressing any doubts. If we couldn't depend on Colin Powell to give it to us straight back then, what makes us think we can rely on Gen. Petraeus now to say what he really thinks, unedited, and without due fealty to his commander in chief? Is Petraeus a better or more honorable man than Powell? Maybe so. Or, more likely, is it the nature of the job to button one's lip when one knows the commander in chief thinks differently?

Indeed Petraeus was promoted with the very task of executing the 'surge' strategy. A majority of the American public doesn't think Petraeus is about to say anything to undermine the wisdom and credibility of that strategy. In other words, they don't trust Petraeus not to sugar-coat it. (Thank God, there is still a majority with the sense God gave them!...)

GQ ICON: COLIN POWELL
He was pushed aside in the run-up to war, but as he tells Walter Isaacson, he, too, bears some of the blame

Interview by Walter Isaacson

Q: Your hero General George Marshall, when he was secretary of state, oversaw the creation of amazing new institutions and doctrines—NATO, the Marshall Plan—to deal with the global threat posed by Soviet Communism. Now that we're faced with new global threats, what type of creative responses would he and his wise men be devising?

To some extent, he faced a more dangerous threat, and it was an easier one to work with. There was one identifiable enemy that was on the other side of an identifiable terrain feature. It was state versus state. They were able to put in place state-based structures.

Q: Isn't the new global threat we face even more dangerous?

What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?

I would approach this differently, in almost Marshall-like terms. What are the great opportunities out there—ones that we can take advantage of? It should not be just about creating alliances to deal with a guy in a cave in Pakistan. It should be about how do we create institutions that keep the world moving down a path of wealth creation, of increasing respect for human rights, creating democratic institutions, and increasing the efficiency and power of market economies? This is perhaps the most effective way to go after terrorists.

Q: So you think we are getting too hunkered down and scared?

Yes! We are taking too much counsel of our fears.

This doesn't mean there isn't a terrorist threat. There is a threat. And we should send in military forces when we have a target to deal with. We should also secure our airports, if that makes us safer. But let's welcome every foreign student we can get our hands on. Let's make sure that foreigners come to the Mayo Clinic here, and not the Mayo facility in Dubai or somewhere else. Let's make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name. Let's also remember that this country was created by immigrants and thrives as a result of immigration, and we need a sound immigration policy.

Let's show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do. That's why I want to see Guantánamo closed. It's so harmful to what we stand for. We literally bang ourselves in the head by having that place. What are we doing this to ourselves for? Because we're worried about the 380 guys there? Bring them here! Give them lawyers and habeas corpus. We can deal with them. We are paying a price when the rest of the world sees an America that seems to be afraid and is not the America they remember.

You can drive up the road from here and come to a spot where there is a megachurch over here, a little Episcopal church over there, a Catholic church around the corner that's almost cathedral-size, and between them is a huge Hindu temple. There are no police needed to guard any of this. There are not many places in the world where you would see that. Yes, there are a few dangerous nuts in Brooklyn and New Jersey who want to blow up Kennedy Airport and Fort Dix. These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn't do it to ourselves, and we shouldn't use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

Q: One of your legacies to history will be what's known as the Powell Doctrine. How do you define it?

Essentially it says: Avoid war—and if that's not possible, and it's necessary to use arms to solve a political problem, then do it in a decisive way. You remove as much doubt as you can about the outcome. In addition, you need to have a clearly defined mission, and you must have some understanding of how it's going to end.

When the first Gulf War came along, I told President Bush [the elder] that when we had 250,000 troops in the region, we could defend Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion. But if he wanted to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, then General Schwarzkopf will need an additional 250,000 troops. Everybody gasped. And I told the president exactly how we would use them all, and he agreed.

We also had a clear mission, which was to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And that's how we built a coalition with almost every other country in the world. We thought through where it was going to end. We said we wanted to leave Iraq with enough of an army so that it is not threatened by Iran. And we want to accomplish the mission we were given, which is getting the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. We were not interested in taking down the government. It was never our mission to go to Baghdad. For twelve years, I had to listen to criticism about that part of the plan. I don't hear it criticized too much now.

Q: The current Iraq war seems to have violated almost all of these precepts. We talked about this before the war.

The military presented its plans, and I was secretary of state, so it wasn't really my role, but I said it didn't seem to me that the plans called for enough force to impose our will or enough troops to deal with the problems that might come up. After one of the meetings, I felt strongly enough about it that I took the liberty to call General Tommy Franks [the regional commander] directly—something I shouldn't have done, but I did. I said, "Let's talk general-to-general." I said, "I have my doubts as to whether or not you have enough force to execute." And Tommy said, "Well, I think we do, Mr. Secretary." And then he immediately called Don Rumsfeld, which he should have. And Don correctly said, "It's good that Colin has been up-front, and now let's discuss it in front of the president." And we did. The president heard from his military commanders and his joint chiefs of staff and his secretary of defense that they felt they had enough troops.

Q: Were they right?

They were right for the first part, the capture of Baghdad. And I never really had any question about the force needed for that. My question had been, "Have you guys really thought through the aftermath?" That's what we hadn't done. That was the big mistake. Don had written a list of the worst things that could happen, but we didn't do the contingency planning on what we would do about it. So we watched those buildings get burned down, and nobody told the divisions, "Hey, go in there and declare martial law and whack a few people and it will stop."

Then the insurgency started, and we didn't acknowledge it. They said it wasn't an insurgency. They looked up the definition. They said it was a few dead-enders! And so we didn't respond in a way that might have stopped it. And then the civil war started at the beginning of last year. I call it a civil war, but some say no, it's not a civil war, it's a war against civilians. In fact, we have total civil disorder.

Q: Do you think the surge makes sense?

You can surge all of the American troops you want, but they can't stop this. Suppose I'm a battalion commander. My troops ask, "What do I do today, boss?" "Let's go fight the Shia militias!" "What do I do tomorrow?" "Let's go fight the Sunni insurgents!" "What do I do the day after tomorrow?" "Let's go chase Al Qaeda!" "What do we do the day after that?" "We're going to guard streets!" Our kids are fantastic. But this is not sustainable. Our surge can work only with an Iraqi political and military surge.

Q: Are you sorry you didn't question things more forcefully?

At the time, when I felt the president might not have focused on all the potential consequences, I said I needed to see him. I went to the White House and had a private session with him. I told him that we could knock over Saddam's regime but he needed to understand what we would be faced with once we had done that. It was my "When you break it, you own it" speech. I said that this invasion would tie up the better part of 40 percent of our army for an indefinite period of time. It will be hugely expensive. You will be dealing with this for a long time to come. I said, "Take it to the U.N. See if we can get something from the U.N. that might allow us to avoid this war." He said, "Let's share this with the others." And a few days later, we had a discussion with everyone, some by videoconference. They eventually agreed that we should take it to the U.N., some more willingly than others. Dick [Cheney] didn't think it would work, and Don [Rumsfeld] I was not sure about, because you couldn't always tell his opinion. Had I done my duty? I think so.

Q: Do you feel responsible for giving the U.N. flawed intelligence?

I didn't know it was flawed. Everybody was using it. The CIA was saying the same thing for two years. I gave perhaps the most accurate presentation of the intelligence as we knew it—without any of the "Mushroom clouds are going to show up tomorrow morning" and all the rest of that stuff. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong.

Q: Was it twisted?

Not by me. What I used was the intelligence that was also available to everyone in the administration and to the Congress. Some of these senators are now presidential candidates who are saying they didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate they had asked for. It is fair, however, to say that some members of the administration took the intelligence to a higher plane than it deserved.

Q: So you think we should be a bit more on guard against arrogance when we pursue a democracy agenda?

[laughs] Very good, very good. We have a tendency to lecture and perhaps not think things through. We have to be careful what we wish for. Are we happy with the democracy that Hamas gave us? There are some places that are not ready for the kind of democracy we find so attractive for ourselves. They are not culturally ready for it, they are not historically ready for it, and they don't have the needed institutions.

Q: How can we restore America's image?

We should remember what that image was, back after World War II. It was the image of a generous country that sought not to impose its will on other countries or even to impose its values. But it showed the way, and it helped other countries, and it opened its doors to people—visitors and refugees and immigrants.

America could not survive without immigration. Even the undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economy. That's the country my parents came to. That's the image we have to portray to the rest of the world: kind, generous, a nation of nations, touched by every nation, and we touch every nation in return. That's what people still want to believe about us. They still want to come here. We've lost a bit of the image, but we haven't lost the reality yet. And we can fix the image by reflecting a welcoming attitude—and by not taking counsel of our fears and scaring ourselves to death that everybody coming in is going to blow up something. It ain't the case.

Intel analysts' new caution post-Iraq

News Analysis: New caution among U.S. intelligence analysts

By Mark Mazzetti

March 2, 2007 | International Herald Tribune

For more than three years, American intelligence officials have insisted that they learned from their mistakes in the months leading to the Iraq war, when murky information about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs was presented as fact and inconclusive judgments were hardened into statements of near certainty.

The more calibrated intelligence assessments that have come to light in recent weeks, particularly on Iran and North Korea, appear to show a new willingness by American spy agencies to concede the limits of their knowledge.

The new caution reflects adherence to what some officials now call "the Powell Rule." That rule is intended to avoid a repetition of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's humiliation after the satellite photos and intercepted communications he presented to the United Nations Security Council as proof that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons turned out to be nothing of the sort.

It was in large part because of the Iraq intelligence debacle that top intelligence officials over the past year have overhauled the way in which they pass judgments about some of the world's most difficult spying targets, including Iran and North Korea. The new operating approach is intended to ensure that intelligence is solid before it is publicly presented, and even then, that clear distinctions are made between facts and inferences.

Intelligence professionals have several motivations for the new approach. Those include protecting their own credibility and ensuring that assessments can stand up to careful scrutiny in the wake of multiple government investigations condemning the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. Officials also said that greater caution had become ever more necessary because of increasing inexperience in the work force; about 50 percent of current intelligence analysts have less than five years of experience.

At the same time, the use of specific, careful language is seen by intelligence professionals as a barrier that can help to prevent intelligence assessments from being exaggerated, twisted or otherwise misused by policy makers to advance specific agendas.

Under the new guidelines, the assessments produced by intelligence agencies must include detailed descriptions of the subjects on which analysts disagree, and analysts must now "show their work" by including in their judgments the chain of logic that led them to their conclusions.

Intelligence analysis has always been more art than science, and in recent statements, American intelligence officials have laid bare the limits of what they believe they know about Iran and North Korea. Officials have said they are certain that Iranian paramilitary groups are providing lethal bomb material to Iraqi Shiite groups, but they do not know whether this support has been approved at the highest levels of government in Tehran.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week, Mike McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, said that it was possible Iran could produce a nuclear weapon by the beginning of the next decade, but that it was also possible Iran would not develop a weapon until 2015. At the same hearing, another top official acknowledged publicly that the American intelligence agencies were less certain today than they were five years ago about whether North Korea was pursuing a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

John D. Negroponte formalized the new analytical procedures in a directive issued in January, one of his last acts as director of national intelligence. The directive stated that "the analytic process must be as transparent as possible" and that "analysis must be objective and independent of political considerations."

The pre-emptive war doctrine that President Bush has articulated since the Sept. 11 attacks holds that the United States has an obligation take action against security threats before they fully materialize. A corollary embraced by the White House has held that policy makers must assume the worst about the intentions of adversaries, even with imperfect intelligence about their intentions and capabilities.

That worst-case approach was very much on display when Bush said with certainty in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. On North Korea, Bush said in November 2002 that "contrary to an agreement they had with the United States, they're enriching uranium, with the desire of developing a weapon."

As intelligence agencies have backed away from those views, some former officials worry that the Iraq experience may cause the pendulum to swing too far in the direction of circumspection. They say that they hope the administration does not accept at face value the denials from North Korea and Iran about their banned weapons programs.

"I worry about that, but I am not willing to accept that doomsday is upon us," said John R. Bolton, who stepped down in December as ambassador to the United Nations after it was clear he would not win Senate confirmation. Bolton said he still believed that policy makers would not allow intelligence analysts' new caution to soften the United States' policies toward its enemies too much.

The intelligence community's renewed emphasis on debate and dissent has been reflected in decisions about which officials earned promotions in the aftermath of the Iraq intelligence failures.

Thomas Fingar, who once ran the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, is now in charge of all analysis for the director of national intelligence.

It was Fingar's State Department office in 2002 that produced one of the most significant dissents to that year's National Intelligence Estimate, now discredited, challenging the majority view that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes to build up its nuclear weapons program.

During an interview late last year, Fingar said it was now his job to ensure there was as much competitive analysis as possible before intelligence reports were completed, if only to avoid a repeat of the 2002 N.I.E. findings, which were pivotal to the Senate vote that authorized the Iraq war.

"The basic idea is to avoid a premature rush to an artificial consensus," Fingar said. "The interesting thing is not when analysts agree. It's when they disagree."