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Ex-CIA agent's warnings on WMD validity ignored

Sunday, June 25, 2006; Posted: 10:36 a.m. EDT (14:36 GMT)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector's claims about the country's mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. Speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable and a liar.

Drumheller told the Post he was surprised when a few days later, on February 5, 2003, Powell told the U.N. Security Council that "we have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails."

"We thought we had taken care of the problem, but I turn on the television and there it was again," said Drumheller, the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year.

He described repeated attempts to alert top CIA officials to concerns about the defector before Powell's speech.

He said he also issued warnings before President Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech that included Bush statements about Iraq's mobile labs "designed to produce germ warfare agents."

The warnings had no visible impact on then-CIA Director George Tenet, the paper said, who vouched for the accuracy of the mobile lab claim in briefing Powell before his speech. Tenet now says he learned of the problems with Curveball much later and received no warnings from Drumheller or anyone else.

The influence of Curveball in U.S. Claims about Iraqi bioweapons programs has been described in reports by the Los Angeles Times and a commission on U.S. Intelligence failures, the Post said, but Drumheller's first-hand account added new details of the CIA's embrace of a source whose credibility was unraveling.

The paper said the source was living in Germany, where the country's foreign intelligence service had granted him asylum and immigration permits for his family in return for details on one of President Saddam Hussein's long-rumored weapons of mass destruction programs.

The German intelligence agency BND passed the defector's stories to the Americans, but when pressed by the CIA it said nothing had been verified. Drumheller said a German official told him at one point, "I think the guy is a fabricator."

"He said, 'We also think he has psychological problems. We could never validate his reports,"' Drumheller told the Post.

When Drumheller relayed the warnings, it sparked a series of contentious meetings with other CIA analysts who believed reports from the source, whose name has never been revealed.

Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 11:44:21 AM

Very sad that tens of thousands have died over lies. (yes I do include the Iraqi losses).

But isn't that human tradition, tell a lie to stay in power. It got Bush re-elected didn't it.

Last edited: Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 10:28:24 PM

Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 10:27:17 PM

I like how the press says and there are NO weapons of mass destruction... Then when they say there is and there is 500+ of them then they say NOTHING so that everyone still thinks there are none.

Pray to GOD for him to reveal himself to you.

Monday, June 26, 2006 at 7:28:44 PM

I like how you ignore the age of these Jacob...they're from 1991, and aren't capable of doing any kind of "mass destruction."

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 3:46:14 AM

I got a bullet from 1991 wanna stand in front of it and see if it works Mon?

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 4:28:26 AM

I doubt a mushroom cloud will come from it.

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 4:51:49 AM
LGM

Anyone heard of Johnson Atoll?

Fun little place out west of Hawaii. The US operated a chemical weapon disposal plant there.

They decommissioned nerve gas weapons out there. Even the old ones are dangerous.

Serin, anyone? How about some VX?

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/2000/b11302000_bt715-00.html

 

In 1985 the United States Congress ordered the disposal of all stockpiled chemical agents and munitions and construction began on the incineration plant. Destruction of the weapons began in 1990. In November 2000 the destruction operation was completed and involved more than 400,000 rockets, projectiles, bombs, mortars and mines. In April 2001 the United States Army Chemical Pacific closes and the clean-up of Johnston Island began.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to gain oversight of the island in 2004 as a wildlife refuge. It is not normal practice for a wildlife refuge to be established over a plutonium landfill and there is still considerable concern that the contaminants absorbed by fish could carry the threat elsewhere.

There is also considerable concern that the radioactive rubble left behind has not been adequately contained with the estimated life of the sea wall being less than fifty years.

 

^from http://www.janeresture.com/johnston/

BUT, Nyar's topic seems to have gotten off track. I see his point about the WMD rumors, and the source not being too reliable, but what about the question? Is liberal bias cyclical?

I believe it is. The public in the US tends to get sick of having the same party in power. If the Republicans are in too long, then a Democrat gets elected. If a Democrat is in too long, then the public gets tired of them and goes the other way. Sheep are pretty easy to get to move in new directions if you know how to do it.

I think the cycle is a result of the manipulative way elections are run. Last night I saw a cute little ad. The committee to elect a Republican guy ran an ad mentioning the "Death Tax' over and over. Then they accused the Democratic incumbent of being for the "Death Tax". No one could possibly be in favor of a "Death Tax", could they?

There was no mention of who benefits from that tax (actually called the Estate Tax), or who actually pays that tax (pretty much just the wealthy folks).

Notice the nasty use of language? Which sounds worse to you, the Estate Tax, or the Death Tax? And then they end the ad with a photo of a vulture with the Senator's head photoshopped on.

Biased? You bet. Unusual? Not at all. Watch out for those manipulation tactics, folks. Midterm elections are this fall in the US.

Last edited: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 1:21:15 PM

Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 1:04:24 PM

Thanks for the spry comment, wOOt, but your bullet wasn't why we invaded Iraq. Want the official response? Hear it straight from the Fair and Balanced folks, so it must be true:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200499,00.html

 

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

 

So, STILL NO F'EN SMOKING GUN, AFTER GRAVEYARDS FULL OF DEAD F'EN BODIES: AMERICAN AND IRAQI AND OTHERS, INNOCENT AND GUILTY AND PLAUSIBLY DENIABLE.

So KKB et al., you can cram all that "We're finally justified!" crap right back where it came from. At least for now. It'll just cost us a few more lives willingly spent and taken by our brave soldiers (note: no sarcasm on that "brave" part, folks, so you can save the anti-patriotic accusations for someone f'en else). Give or take a few dozen, a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few ten-thousand . If the "WMDs for which this country went to war" even f'en exist.

Last edited: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 11:30:24 PM

Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 11:28:37 PM

Sorry for the flame-out folks. Got a little carried away there. Besides, my comments mostly belonged in another thread.

You got a decent discusion going here, Nyar. Good food for thought and discussion. I think our political system does indeed build this kind of cyclicity into our history. It's kind of a way to self-regulate or at least self-check ourselves, even if we can get on a roll one way or the other and take perhaps too long to balance ourselves again.

Unfortunately, I think it would work better (and perhaps should, by original design intents?) if the balance came about by reaching a compromise between sides, rather than switching back and forth across polarized opposites Like we have been over the recent past.

Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 10:50:56 PM

I'm with ya, GeOrge, and LGM, and Infinite Monkey, and Stink...for all the good it'll do. We see in microcosm a taste of the "True Believers" who sit from wherever it is they live, look at the same processes and events as us, draw none of the same conclusions, make none of the same parallels, question none of their assumptions.
Damnable facts turn out to be nothing more than more Liberal bias...always. Nothing changes. Don't forget about Clinton and that intern though, or what about Ted Kennedy and that girl that drowned in his car? That's right. Ignorance and Arrogance rule the day. But there will come another day, I hope.

In the meantime, I saw a great bumper sticker:

If you're not completely appalled,
you haven't been paying attention.

Friday, June 30, 2006 at 12:45:18 AM

It is pretty cyclical. Both parties tend to mess things up and skew towards their own partisan agenda rather than actually doing anything.

An experience a friend of mine had with the Democratic party:

 

I thought it would have been difficult to outshine the RCP in terms of creepiness and pushiness. I was wrong.

Let me give you some background.

I have had some limited dealings with the RCP with regards to its WorldCan'tWait campaign. I was helping to coordinate some local activities with regards to my infoshop and school, and I was put in touch, by e-mail, with a local WCW representative. He gave me some protest ideas and advice, and that was helpful. But then he very quickly recommended that I be present for a conference call that the WCW would be having. That seemed like I would be getting in a little too deep with WCW for my taste. It seemed rather unnecessary as well. And it kind of creeped me out. I made up an excuse for not attending. This was before I knew that the RCP was heavily involved with WCW.

Since then I've learned more about how the RCP operates, and although I can't approve of it, I must also say that it's not unusual as far as political parties go, especially when compared with the "bourgeois" political parties (Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.) These bourgeois parties seem even worse!

For I have also had some limited dealings (unfortunately and against my own rational sense) with the Democratic Party. At last year's local Labor Day festivities, I was feeling in a cooperative mood, and I wanted to curry favor with some of the Democrats early on because later I would be setting up a table with anarcho-syndicalist literature and two red-and-black flags flying high, and I wanted to build some trust beforehand. So I exhanged some supportive words and e-mail addresses with some brightly-smiling liberals.

Pretty soon I start to get lots of annoying e-mails from this group of liberals asking me to donate money, be present for meetings, volunteer for campaigns, etc. I just ignore them. A few weeks later I get a package in the mail. It is full of campaign and recruiting materials for a campaign to draft and promote this local Democrat in a state election. I was thinking "what the hell...?" Then I find out that I have been made a "Team Captain" in this campaign. Now I'm thinking "What the f@%&!?"

So I e-mail these people and tell them to remove me from being a team captain and from their e-mail list. The reply I get is literally (I am not making this up), "Who cares what you think anyway?" And I continue to receive e-mails and notices about "Team Captain meetings"! I e-mail them again, asking to be taken off the list.

A few days later I receive a phone call. It is from a guy working on this campaign. He starts interrogating me about why I "won't support this campaign to elect ----Mr. Bigturd politician----." I tried to explain to him why electing leaders wouldn't make any difference whatsoever. He goes on to berate me on my stance and badger me about why I have "changed my mind on this" (even though I never supported this campaign in the first place), and then he asks once again, "But c'mon, why won't you support this campaign to elect ----Mr. Bigturn policitian----." He wouldn't take no for an answer. But I told him no once again. I expected him to say "Well, thank you for your time, goodbye" and hang up. But he just stayed on the line for a second in silence. It was very creepy. He asked, "Okay, so where do we go from here? What am I going to have to do to convince you that you need to support this campaign to blah blah blah..." and I just interrupted him and said, "I have nothing left to say to you" and I just hung up on him. Talk about pushy and creepy! I can only imagine what hell it must be working as a rank-and-file member of the Democratic Party.

 

 

Friday, June 30, 2006 at 4:05:12 AM

George, where's the love, man?

Sunday, July 02, 2006 at 8:21:10 AM

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