April 3, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Curveball the Goofball
I had an editor once whose wife was in the Audubon
Society. There were a lot of articles about birds in that
newspaper.
I had an editor once who loved fishing. There were a lot
of articles about fish in that newspaper.
Organizations organically respond to please the boss.
Bosses naturally surround themselves with people who tell
them what they want to hear.
When King Lear's favorite daughter spoke frankly to him,
and refused to fawn like her sisters, she was instantly
banished. Insincerity pays.
It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the
chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that
intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence
was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes
of those running the White House and Pentagon.
As the commission's co-chairman, Laurence Silberman, put
it: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the
use of intelligence by policy makers, and all of us were
agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."
Huh? That's like an investigation into steroids in
baseball that looks only at the drug companies, not the
players who muscled up.
We don't need a 14-month inquiry producing 601 pages at a
cost of $10 million to tell us the data on arms in Iraq was
flawed. We know that. When we got over there, we didn't find
any.
This is the fourth exhaustive investigation that has not
answered the basic question: How did the White House and
Pentagon spin the information and why has no one gotten in
trouble for it? If your kid lied and hid stuff from you to
do something he thought would be great, then wouldn't admit
it and blamed someone else, he'd be punished - even if his
adventure worked out all right for him.
When the "values" president and his aides do it, they're
rewarded. Condoleezza Rice was promoted to secretary of
state. Stephen Hadley, Condi's old deputy, was promoted to
national security adviser. Bob Joseph, a national security
aide who helped shovel the uranium hooey into the State of
the Union address, is becoming an under secretary of state.
Paul Wolfowitz, who painted the takeover of Iraq as such a
cakewalk that our troops went in without the proper armor or
backup, will run the World Bank. George Tenet, who ran the
C.I.A. when Al Qaeda attacked and when Saddam's mushroom
cloud gained credibility, got the Medal of Freedom.
Then the president appoints a compliant Democrat and a
complicit conservative judge to head an inquiry set up to
let the president off the hook.
Please, no more pantomime investigations. We all know
what happened. Dick Cheney and the neocons had a fever to
sack Saddam. Mr. Cheney and Rummy persuaded W., "the Man,"
that it was the manly thing to do. Everybody feigned a 9/11
connection. Ahmad Chalabi conned his neocon pals, thinking
he could run Iraq if he gave the Bush administration the
smoking gun it needed to sell the war.
Suddenly Curveball appeared, the relative of an aide to
Mr. Chalabi, to become the lone C.I.A. source with the news
that Iraq was cooking up biological agents in mobile
facilities hidden from arms inspectors and Western spies.
Curveball's obviously sketchy assertions ended up in Mr.
Tenet's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and
Colin Powell's U.N. speech in February 2003, laying the
groundwork for an invasion of Iraq.
Curveball's information was used to justify the war even
though it was clear Curveball was a goofball. As the
commission report notes, a Defense Department employee at
the C.I.A. met with him and "was concerned by Curveball's
apparent 'hangover' during their meeting" and suspicious
that Curveball spoke excellent English, even though the
Foreign Service had told U.S. intelligence officials that
Curveball did not speak English.
By early 2001, the C.I.A. was receiving messages from our
Foreign Service, reporting that Curveball was "out of
control" and off the radar. A foreign intelligence service
also warned the C.I.A. in April 2002 that it had "doubts
about Curveball's reliability" and that elements of the
tippling tipster's behavior "strike us as typical of
individuals we would normally assess as fabricators."
But Curveball's crazy assertions had traction because
they were what the White House wanted to hear.
The report warns the president to watch out for the
"headstrong" intelligence agencies. If only the commission
had concerned itself with headstrong officials at a higher
level. Then its 601 pages would be worth reading.
E-mail:
liberties@nytimes.com
Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation. |
