Sunday, November 20, 2005

Real Live Idiots

The people in charge if this country are absolutely real live idiots. Read the whole story in the LA Times & you will wonder how in the world we could be more embarassed by Bu$hCo. Some excerpts from the article below.

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'

"The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.

After the CIA vouched for Curveball's accounts, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had 'mobile biological weapons labs' designed to produce 'germ warfare agents.' Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

Powell also highlighted Curveball's 'eyewitness' account when he warned the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough weapons-grade microbes 'in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people.'"


UPDATE:

More on the LA Times story from Patrick Lang. Via Atrios.


UPDATE #2:
Josh Marshall has more:

"But the Times article suggests that many people in the stream of information passing back and forth between German and US intelligence and the White House were not spoken to either. And those people provided information which puts the whole matter in a rather more sinister light -- not just botched intelligence work and analysis but deliberate distortions of what evidence we had before the war and refusals to come clean about highly relevant contradictory information.

"This speaks again to a point we and many others have made repeatedly: the highly circumscribed nature of these two investigations. The very structure and scope of these inquiries were designed to leave much of the story untold -- quite apart from the numerous intentionally misleading passages we've noted in the Senate intel report from last year."

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