Bush Threw Us a 'Curveball'

Last October, just weeks before the presidential election, I wrote a column stating that the acting director of the CIA was suppressing a report to Congress that was potentially embarrassing to President Bush's campaign. The report had been completed by the CIA's own independent inspector general four months before the election, yet the agency rebuffed Congress' request that it be made public.

Now, thanks to last week's release of another report, that of the Bush-appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, we learn that the embargoed CIA report centered on the outrageous case of the now-infamous Iraqi informant known by the code name, "Curveball."

Unfortunately for the American people, we were to an embarrassing extent persuaded to go to war based on the fantasies of this known liar, the main source of the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had a functioning biological weapons program. It was Curveball, an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected, who was the inspiration for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's statements before the United Nations that the U.S. knew Iraq possessed mobile bio-weapons labs.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the presidential commission's finding that Curveball's unreliability was withheld from the unwitting Powell, even as the administration was pushing him out onto the world stage to trade his prodigious credibility for world support for the invasion.

Ironically, Powell's U.N. sales job, which had the U.S. press raving about his statesmanlike bearing and brilliant mind, was aimed squarely at rebutting the conclusions of U.N. weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq, who were not finding the weapons and weapons-making facilities that U.S. intelligence agencies had pinpointed.

Yet, as the commission's report makes indelibly clear, the U.N. inspectors -- who exercised extraordinary access in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion -- were right. From the aluminum tubes debunked by the U.S. Energy Department to the Africa uranium story debunked by Ambassador Joe Wilson, from the anthrax-laden drone aircraft that White House briefers told senators threatened Florida to Curveball's futuristic-sounding mobile bio-weapons labs that have never been found, Powell and the White House were, as the president's commission has just unanimously concluded, "dead wrong."