christiefan915
Catalyst
Excerpts from an article by an Iraq war correspondent detail the lies.
NEW YORK -- Take equal parts of ignorance and arrogance, the standard measure of U.S. policy in the Muslim world, shake well, and you get a frothy cocktail of stupidity and blundering that offers a perfect growth medium for con men, special interest promoters, and disinformation.
The black comedy of the Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" that has just resurfaced tells us much about how the U.S. has made such a mess in the Mideast and why Washington can't understand or deal with the historic revolution now flaring across the Muslim world.
In 2000, an Iraqi, Ahmed al-Janabi, defected to Germany. To bolster his refugee status, he offered Germany's intelligence service, BND, a bunch of laughable lies about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. The most notorious: the claim that President Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons units that threatened the world...
The Germans didn't believe "Curveball". None of his claims checked out. But, being dutiful U.S. allies, and knowing the Bush administration was hungering for alarming reports about Iraq, no matter how dubious, Germany passed on "Curveball's" claims to the CIA...
This is hardly the first time fakers have made monkeys of U.S. intelligence. For a good example, back in the 1980's, a shady Iranian arms dealer and Israeli agent, Manucher Ghorbanifar, sent President Reagan's Washington into hysteria with phony tales of non-existent Libyan hit-men. In 2001, an Israeli agent of influence in the U.S. government and other neocon officials resurfaced fraudster Ghorbanifar in Rome to offer false claims and forged documents about Iraq's supposed nuclear ambitions...
On 5 Feb., 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the UN and gravely warned of nefarious Iraqi germ weapons that threatened the entire world, complete with fanciful drawings of bio-warfare vans. Powell even fingered a little phial of white powder that everyone took to be anthrax. This was a clear reminder of the 2001 anthrax panic in the U.S. that was falsely blamed on Muslim extremists or Iraq...
The Bush administration's standard excuse after the 2003 war was: "well, all our allies also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated this canard last week. In fact, the false intelligence that came from France, Germany, Italy had originally been provided to their intelligence agencies by CIA under long-standing intelligence sharing agreements. Garbage in, garbage out. Some of the original U.S. intelligence on Iraq, which was fake, also came from Iraq's bitter enemies, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...
The US Congress and media bayed for action against Iraq. As war fever swept over the United States, this writer, an old Iraq hand and war correspondent, warned that Powell's claims were absurd and that Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor delivery systems. Other veteran Mideast observers were brushed aside or ignored. Journalists like me who were "not with the program" were silenced, sometimes at the direct demand of the White House Oval office. George Orwell's famous line about how telling the truth in a time of mass lies becomes an act of sedition was never truer...
Thanks to collusion between the Bush White House and the media, over 80% of Americans wrongly believed Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/how-curveball-made-monkey_b_826074.html
NEW YORK -- Take equal parts of ignorance and arrogance, the standard measure of U.S. policy in the Muslim world, shake well, and you get a frothy cocktail of stupidity and blundering that offers a perfect growth medium for con men, special interest promoters, and disinformation.
The black comedy of the Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" that has just resurfaced tells us much about how the U.S. has made such a mess in the Mideast and why Washington can't understand or deal with the historic revolution now flaring across the Muslim world.
In 2000, an Iraqi, Ahmed al-Janabi, defected to Germany. To bolster his refugee status, he offered Germany's intelligence service, BND, a bunch of laughable lies about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. The most notorious: the claim that President Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons units that threatened the world...
The Germans didn't believe "Curveball". None of his claims checked out. But, being dutiful U.S. allies, and knowing the Bush administration was hungering for alarming reports about Iraq, no matter how dubious, Germany passed on "Curveball's" claims to the CIA...
This is hardly the first time fakers have made monkeys of U.S. intelligence. For a good example, back in the 1980's, a shady Iranian arms dealer and Israeli agent, Manucher Ghorbanifar, sent President Reagan's Washington into hysteria with phony tales of non-existent Libyan hit-men. In 2001, an Israeli agent of influence in the U.S. government and other neocon officials resurfaced fraudster Ghorbanifar in Rome to offer false claims and forged documents about Iraq's supposed nuclear ambitions...
On 5 Feb., 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the UN and gravely warned of nefarious Iraqi germ weapons that threatened the entire world, complete with fanciful drawings of bio-warfare vans. Powell even fingered a little phial of white powder that everyone took to be anthrax. This was a clear reminder of the 2001 anthrax panic in the U.S. that was falsely blamed on Muslim extremists or Iraq...
The Bush administration's standard excuse after the 2003 war was: "well, all our allies also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated this canard last week. In fact, the false intelligence that came from France, Germany, Italy had originally been provided to their intelligence agencies by CIA under long-standing intelligence sharing agreements. Garbage in, garbage out. Some of the original U.S. intelligence on Iraq, which was fake, also came from Iraq's bitter enemies, Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia...
The US Congress and media bayed for action against Iraq. As war fever swept over the United States, this writer, an old Iraq hand and war correspondent, warned that Powell's claims were absurd and that Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor delivery systems. Other veteran Mideast observers were brushed aside or ignored. Journalists like me who were "not with the program" were silenced, sometimes at the direct demand of the White House Oval office. George Orwell's famous line about how telling the truth in a time of mass lies becomes an act of sedition was never truer...
Thanks to collusion between the Bush White House and the media, over 80% of Americans wrongly believed Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/how-curveball-made-monkey_b_826074.html
