MSNBC : : A Wicked Curveball
More on the administration's latest scapegoat here:
But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.
But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.
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A Wicked Curveball
No judgments on Iraq were changed due to political pressure, the report said. But just how hard did the commission look?
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
April 11 issue - When a Senate panel released a report last year on the disastrously bad intelligence on Iraq, it included an intriguing e-mail that showed how intensely the administration was looking for damning evidence against Saddam. The e-mail, written by a senior CIA official, addressed a debate that the agency's analysts were having about Curveball, an erratic Iraqi emigre who claimed to have seen Saddam's supposed mobile biological-weapons labs. The CIA had evidence that Curveball was a shameless fabricator months before Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the Iraqi's reports before the United Nations. But in the Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail—written a day before Powell's U.N. appearance—the senior CIA official sharply rebuked one of those skeptical analysts. "Keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote.
Last week a new, bipartisan intelligence panel appointed by President Bush released a 601-page report about Iraq-war intelligence failures. The report includes a detailed new reconstruction of how Curveball's fanciful tales came to be accepted at the highest levels of government.
The commission places almost all the blame on the intelligence community alone and—though it does not name names—the then CIA chief George Tenet. Intelligence officials are blasted for their uncritical and unimaginative thinking. And the report leaves senior policymakers in the Bush administration all but unscathed. "No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure," the report concludes.
Yet the new panel conspicuously omitted the "Powers That Be" e-mail that appeared in the Senate report. In fact, commission leaders seemed to not even know of its existence. "What e-mail are you talking about?" Judge Lawrence Silberman, the chairman, testily responded when asked by a NEWSWEEK reporter why it wasn't included in the report. "I'm mystified." Two hours later, after NEWSWEEK supplied the panel with a copy of the e-mail from the Senate report, a commission spokesman explained that the panel was aware of it but chose not to include it because its contents were already known. But its absence from the report raises questions of whether the Silberman panel may have "cherry-picked" evidence to exclude anything politically embarrassing to the "Powers That Be." Not so, says the White House. A senior official says the report lays to rest any notion that the administration lied or falsified intelligence. "People now understand that what we were saying publicly is what we were being told privately," the official said.
Commission members insist the intel analysts they interviewed "universally assert that in no instance did political pressure cause them to change" their judgments. But the panel report leaves open the critical question of why doubts about the quality of the intelligence were not taken more seriously.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7369843/site/newsweek/
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