The Ashford Zone Blog

Conservative blog Protein Wisdom summarizes the Bush "Pushback Strategy":

Clearly, the important administration arguments are beginning to coalesce:  1) Criticism of the war is not by itself unpatriotic 2) Similarly, answering anti-war critics is not challenging their patriotism 3) But opportunistic and cynical anti-war critics who are trying to walk back their own votes and level spurious charges at the Administration (they lied to take is into war) are themselves lying 4) These lies are hurting the country and the troops.  5) The burden of proof, in a post 911 world, was on Saddam Hussein to prove he’d disarmed; we could not wait for the threat to become imminent before acting 6) The cause the troops are fighting for is just and right 7) Iraq is moving toward freedom; and things on the ground are improving daily, regardless of what the MSM and prominent Dems would have us believe.

These points, taken together, form an easy, concise, and—most importantly—a factually correct counter-narrative to the Dem / MSM narrative . . .

Easy?  Concise?  Bwaaaaahahahahahahaha!

Let’s try (for a start) "internally contradictory".  The pushback strategy would have you believe that criticizing the war is not unpatriotic (#1 and #2), yet it "hurt(s) the country and the troops" (#4).  Query the definition of "patriotic".

But perhaps #4 does NOT contradict #1 and #2, if #4 only applies to "opportunistic and cynical anti-war critics who are trying to walk back their own votes"(#3).  Of course, that defies logical sense.  How exactly does changing one’s mind about the war (as opposed to always being against it) hurt the troops and the country?

And, of course, #3 resurrects the canard that Democrats "voted for the war".  What many of them voted for, and what they understood their vote to mean (as many said at the time), was that they gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq so Bush could go to the U.N. and get international support behind him.  Bush, at the time, was publically saying that he wasn’t even sure he intended to invade Iraq.  With trust in those statements, the Democrats supported the October resolution.  That’s far different from actually supporting invasion itself.

But, whatever.  I’m not an opportunistic and cynical war critic attempting to walk back on my vote.  I didn’t GET a vote, and if I DID, my position now is the same as it was then.  So #3 doesn’t apply to me. 

#5 is the biggest joke.  If neo-cons were really interested in Saddam meeting (or not meeting) his burden of proof, they would have allowed to let the inspectors continue to inspect Iraq.  If neo-cons were honest, with themselves if not others, they would admit that would NEVER have been satisifed with whatever proof Saddam (or inspectors) offered.

I have no problem with #6.  Assuming that "the cause the troops are fighting for" can be defined as "combating terrorism".  Of course, it avoids the chief criticism, to wit, does our presence in Iraq reduce terrorism, or increase it?  Most people, including promiment military experts and leaders, think the latter.  So saying that "the cause" is just and right does not serve as an approval of the dysfunctional way in which we achieve that goal.

And if Iraq is moving toward freedom (#7), doesn’t that mean, on some level, "Mission Accomplished"?  Doesn’t that mean we can at least discuss bringing troops home?  Or are we planning to stay until democracy there is 100% perfect, something which we didn’t (arguably) achieve until the end of our civil war some 80 years after democracy’s birth?

For those who haven’t heard it yet, the story of Curveball is an important component of the whole pre-war intelligence issue.

I’m going to turn the mike over to Pat Lang, retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, who served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism" for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.  Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Blogging here, Lang comments on "Curveball" and the important LA Times story:

In the case of Iraq, the US went to war because the American people became convinced that Iraq was a direct threat to the American homeland. They were convinced of that through an artfully orchestrated campaign of half-truths which used evidence from dubious sources to make the case for Iraq as a threat to the US. Paul Wolfowitz admitted as much in public when he said (paraphrasing) that WMD was sold to the American people as a threat because it COULD be sold and that nothing else would serve to take us to war.

CURVEBALL, the Iraqi source of the German intelligence (BND) became an essential element in the campaign of distorted and manipulated information. CURVEBALL was a fraud. The Germans said they did not believe him. DIA said they did not believe him, but the Bush Administration evidently did believe him. Why? They believed because they wanted to believe.

Goetz and Drogin’s story in the Los Angeles Times lays out the sad story of incompetence and deception which centers, at least in part, around this man.

Some samples from the article:

"The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

"Curveball’s German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said." The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst."

"The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball’s case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball’s claims as a justification for war. "We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence." In a telephone interview, Powell said that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and his top deputies personally assured him before his U.N. speech that U.S. intelligence on the mobile labs was "solid." Since then, Powell said, the case "has totally blown up in our faces.""

"CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called "water cooler gossip" into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks. Curveball’s motive, CIA officials said, was not to start a war. He simply was seeking a German visa."

""The Iraqis were adept at feeding us what we wanted to hear," said a former official of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency who helped debrief about 50 Iraqi emigres in Germany before the war. "Most of it was garbage.” "

"On Feb. 5, 2003, Powell told the packed U.N. chamber that his account was based on "solid sources" and "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." "We thought maybe they had the smoking gun," recalled the BND supervisor, who watched Powell on TV. "My gut feeling was the Americans must have so much from reconnaissance planes and satellites, from infiltrated spotter teams from Special Forces, and other systems. We thought they must have tons of stuff." Instead, Powell emphasized Curveball’s "eyewitness" account, calling it "one of the most worrisome things that emerge from the thick intelligence file.""

""Powell’s speech failed to sway many diplomats, but it had an immediate impact in Baghdad. "The Iraqis scoured the country for trailers," said a former CIA official who helped interrogate Iraqi officials and scientists in U.S. custody after the war. "They were in real panic mode. They were terrified that this was real, and they couldn’t explain it." An explanation was available within days, but U.S. officials ignored it. On Feb. 8, three days after Powell’s speech, the U.N.’s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball’s former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied." "U.N. teams also raided the other sites Curveball had named. They interrogated managers, seized documents and used ground-penetrating radar, according to U.N. reports. The U.N. inspectors "could find nothing to corroborate Curveball’s reporting," the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group reported last year. On March 7, 2003, Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector, told the Security Council that a series of searches had found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. It drew little notice at the time."

"One CIA-led unit investigated Curveball himself. The leader was "Jerry," a veteran CIA bio-weapons analyst who had championed Curveball’s case at the CIA weapons center. They found Curveball’s personnel file in an Iraqi government storeroom. It was devastating. Curveball was last in his engineering class, not first, as he had claimed. He was a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Most important, records showed Curveball had been fired in 1995, at the very time he said he had begun working on bio-warfare trucks. A former CIA official said Curveball also apparently was jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi. Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball’s family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball’s former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations." "The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, ‘This guy? You’ve got to be kidding.’ "Jerry tracked down Curveball’s Sunni Muslim parents in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood. "Our guy was very polite," Kay recalled. "He said, ‘We understand your son doesn’t like Americans.’ His mother looked shocked. She said, ‘No, no! He loves Americans.’ And she took him into [her son’s] bedroom and it was filled with posters of American rock stars. It was like any other teenage room. She said one of his goals was to go to America."The deeper Jerry probed, the worse Curveball looked."

We were made fools of. By whom? Is it not obvious?

Take note:

The Iraqi government was frightened and surprised by Powell’s assertions at the UN about mobile bio-weapons production facilities. They searched the country looking for whatever it was we were talking about. they seem to have been afraid that there was something going on that they did not know about.

We should all be ashamed in this country. We should be ashamed that we are so childish and easily manipulated that CURVEBALL’s supposed story and that of all the other shoddy sources and rumor mongers were so easily "sold" to us by a band of political extremists. Our gullibility raises the issue of our collective worthiness to be the sovereigns of the commonweal of whom Jefferson wrote.