Monday, November 21, 2005

Quote of the Day "I haven't heard that many gunshots" --Camden, New Jersey resident Gracy Muniz, in defense of her city after it was ranked as America's most dangerous for the second year in a row. 10:49:22 PM    comment []

Bad Santas John Cusack and Harold Ramis talk about making movies without selling your soul -- or dressing up -- and their very dark holiday comedy. Director Harold Ramis and John Cusack on the set of "The Ice Harvest." Photo by Focus Features   By Heather Havrilesky, Salon.com Nov. 22, 2005 | When you spot a 6-foot-tall green reindeer waving at you from the roof of a building on the weekend before Thanksgiving, does it fill your heart with joy, or do you cringe? Are you among the millions of Americans who welcome the holiday season with open, loving arms -- or among those who flinch at the sight of tinsel and groan at the sound of the first dippy Christmas carol? Recognizing that the holidays aren't a holly, jolly time for everyone, filmmaker Harold Ramis teamed up with John Cusack to create a comedy so dark, it could make even the sourest of Grinches curl his toes. "The Ice Harvest" follows the exploits of Cusack's Charlie, a mob lawyer in Wichita, Kansas, who spends time at strip bars and dives instead of with his kids; his sneaky, scumbag friend Pete (Oliver Platt); and Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), his nonchalantly soulless co-worker. With so many vile miscreants in the mix, how can we tell who's remotely worth rooting for? Or maybe the better question is, how can we not root for Cusack? Whether he's playing lovestruck Lloyd Dobler of "Say Anything" or hapless puppeteer Craig Schwartz in "Being John Malkovich," Cusack has an uncanny knack for winning audiences' sympathies with a few hangdog looks and aw-shucks shuffles of the feet. Ramis, whose film résumé reads like a classic comedy top 10, from Second City TV to "Animal House" (co-wrote) to "Ghostbusters" (co-wrote and starred in) to "Caddyshack" (co-wrote and directed), explains that this quality made Cusack the perfect guy for such a shady part -- that and the big ideas floating around in Cusack's head. On a Saturday morning at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, Ramis and Cusack sat down to describe the process of collaborating, the hollow nature of strip bars, and the challenge of sorting through 31 flavors of evil. What was unique about your experience working together? Ramis: Well, you don't get a lot of actors who want you to read a book on the lies of modernism in postwar Europe. How did you like the book? Ramis: It was interesting. Actually, we're both probably screwed up in the same way. We actually have discussions about character and the movie and the philosophy of the film and the sociology and politics of it that derive from big, serious ideas. You're both big serious-idea guys. Ramis: Yeah. Well, you know... Cusack: My ideas are kind of smaller and less serious than Harold's. Mine are medium-sized. Ramis: I think they're pretty big. I think we both like to be as fully engaged as we can be. It would be enough to be working professionals in the industry -- that would be enough. But to be working professionals and get to do what you want to do? Even better. And then to do it with your full intelligence, energy, spiritual commitment, that's what we're all about. At what point in your careers did you shift and start to do exactly what you wanted? When do you get the luxury of doing that? Ramis: I think it's harder for an actor. Not having worked as an actor, what looks harder for me is that actors have less control over what they do because they have to wait for something great to come along, or take something that they consider less great and try to make it great, or worse, settle for doing stuff that they know isn't great and won't be great, which would be a little, I think, soul-destroying in the long run. As a writer, you can write whatever you want and no one can stop you. That doesn't mean you're going to sell it, but you have your own authentic voice and you can express it. Directors are kind of in the middle. You have to sell what you're doing, you have to convince actors, you have to work with writers. But whatever you're doing, you accept in the beginning that it's not your full vision. It can't be and probably shouldn't be. As a director, you mean. Ramis: Yeah. Cusack: I don't know anybody who gets only their vision into the film. It's always a collaborative process. You need people to be involved. You need a lot of people to support the film. Ramis: I don't even think of it as compromise, because to me the word "compromise" implies giving up something you really wanted to satisfy a situation. I think the challenge is, if I'm not getting exactly what I thought I wanted -- and I might be wrong -- the challenge is to find something we all want to do and believe in. And that's not a compromise, it's a new vision. And probably it's better than my original vision because now it includes the vision of other creative people. Cusack: Yeah, so if Harold and I are doing something and if I'm doing exactly what he wants, then I'm not expressing myself. It doesn't work. That's the collaboration. I think when you work on films, you can get leveraged moments where you can get a little film and do it just the way you want to do it. With "The Ice Harvest," the budget was low enough, I think, where you don't have anybody telling us what we couldn't do. Whereas if you do a movie for a bigger budget, like 60 million dollars, then you start to deal with corporate interests -- a marketing plan, a marketing committee and people you have to satisfy. "The Ice Harvest" is a pretty simple story, but you say you talked about big ideas. What are some of the big ideas of this movie? Cusack: One thing that kept springing to mind for me was something that Arthur Miller wrote, that an era can be considered over when its basic illusions have become exhausted. I just always thought that at some level, Charlie and Pete have created their own illusions, they're custodians of their own reality. They're responsible, but in another sense they're living this sort of American suburban life and their version of the American dream. When Pete says, "There's nothing left for men in this world, nothing but money and pussy," it's like they were playing by the rules, they were really ambitious, they went for the pussy, they went for the money, they went for the American dream, and it didn't give them any pleasure. So, those were some of the ideas, those were some of the rivers we were swimming down. Why didn't it give them any pleasure? Because they both married that horrible woman? Ramis: I don't think you can blame others. Michael Parks had a line when he was a young movie star. He said, "I've come to the end of me." You know, Charlie, he's come to the end of him. For Charlie, he has nowhere to go. He's tried it all, and it's not worth it. I think it's almost embarrassing to say this because it sounds like a religious thing, but it's not -- it's the search for meaning in life. People attach significance to certain kinds of goals and the society reinforces it every minute of every day: to be rich, to be famous, to be handsome, to be slim, to be popular, to be Christian. Whatever it is, people attach value to certain things that don't inherently make them happy because they don't necessarily mean anything -- as in the big, deep meaning of things, the kind of meaning that nurtures us. Or terrifies us or really connects. Anyone who's been to a strip club, you know, it looks good on paper. I mean, the idea sounds great. But what could be more demoralizing ultimately, or worse for your soul, than sitting on a bar stool handing money to a woman who couldn't care less about you who you're not gonna get? It will just make you feel worse about yourself in the long run. That's as far from real meaning in life as you can get. Cusack: But it ties up the time! Ramis: I remember in the cocaine days when cocaine was all the rage, but people would do so much, there weren't enough drugs in the world to get off on anymore. They'd been so overstimulated. And you see it with people who pursue any kind of addictive behavior. There isn't enough of that thing out there to ever make you feel good enough. So it just starts contributing to the problem. The more you take, the worse you feel. Cusack: I think Charlie is so lost in this spirtual and moral twilight and he's so numb that everything sort of has the same moral weight. There's no difference between any action anymore. Ramis: Even love. When Connie says, "You do love me, right?" he says, "Yeah, I guess, sure, whatever." Cusack: I don't think he can really feel anything. So the illusion of the American dream is all gone. He's not going to have the trophy wife or the Mercedes, his family hates him, so the American dream is gone. So what does he do? He and Vic cling on to the dream of the outlaw making the last score and hitting the road. I mean, what's more ridiculous than that? That's just out of the frying pan, into the fire. Where's he going to go? That's what I thought was so funny. What made John right for this part? Ramis: I think because people perceive John as a good person -- Cusack: Which is a tactical error on their part. Ramis: But I think that because they perceive him as a good person, as long as he's alive [as a character], there's the smallest glimmer of possibility for redemption there. This guy could find himself, could discover something better than he had back then. Charlie isn't the greatest guy, but he's surrounded by all these awful people. Everybody is so rotten, how did you ever sort out or differentiate all of these different varieties of evil? Ramis: Well, there's bad and there's badder. Charlie is like the good kid who wants to do something bad. You know, he's going to steal the candy bar, but he ends up having to kill the clerk to get the candy bar. But it's not that he's bad. He's stealing from someone who's in the mob and so much worse -- you can make a moral justification for that. On a deeper level, he's drawn to these bad people for self-preservation. We talked about this. The two things every person wants is to feel unconditionally loved and to feel safe. As children, we long for that, it's hardwired into us ... he's going with the queen of all the strippers, the worst woman in the world. So that's where he goes for love. And for safety he goes to Vic. That's why guys join gangs. You find the toughest guys and you hang out with them, and if they like you, they protect you. So this kind of natural, almost childlike innocent longing in Charlie to be loved and to feel safe, he just invests it in the two worst people you could find in Wichita. All of his choices are pretty horrible, when you consider his awful wife, and his sneaky friend. Was it to separate this mire of evil into its parts? Cusack: ... [The film has] just the worst portraits of white American men I've ever seen. And at first I read the screenplay and I thought, Oh god, it's so dark. And then I got it - -Oh right, right -- it's funny! But when I first read it, the first 23 pages I thought, Oh my god, this is just so dark. And then somewhere it kicked in that I was supposed to laugh ... I think that no matter how low a character goes, characters always have -- good ones, I think, anyway -- they always have this intense instinct for redemption, no matter where they are. Even if you see violence out on the street, or wherever it is, as soon as it's over and the adrenaline starts to wear off, you can see the regrets flash over those faces and eyes, you know? And everything isn't just good and bad. I think there are complicated trains going one way or the other, you know? Ramis: And I think because it was so rich and complicated, like Oliver [Platt's character] being such a buffoon but having so much soul at the same time, it gave everyone so much to click into. Billy Bob [Thornton] did not care. Billy Bob never wanted to analyze a single moment in the movie, unlike John, Connie [Nielsen] and Oliver, who were all over that -- just, Let's talk about it, let's figure it out, you know, what are we saying? who are we? Cusack: He's probably closest to a sociopath ... I mean Vic [Thornton's character]. Ramis: And in a way, the most integrated, the most sure of who he is without regret and confusion. And you know, Billy Bob, he said this amazing thing. We went over the script a lot before we shot, but Billy Bob came and said, "I just have to tell you I didn't read the script." He said, "Well, I mean, I read it before I took the job. Of course I read it, I love it. But I'm not going to be reading it again before we shoot, because my character doesn't care what anyone else is doing." In one way, it's him not doing his homework, but in another sense, it was true. His character was so self-involved and so self-centered, it doesn't matter what anyone's motivation is, they're just objects to him. You [Cusack] have a pretty huge fan base among people in their 30s, almost like a cult following. Cusack: Really? I don't want to scare you or anything. Cusack: That's OK! Ramis: Is there one particular bar he could go to? Well, let's see, we meet on Wednesdays ... But "Say Anything" is one of those movies that people my age still reference all the time. Cusack: I was only 19 or something when I made that. What kinds of things do people want you to do because of your early career? Cusack: I remember when we were making that film, and Jim Brooks, the executive producer, said, "We want you to come and do this thing," and I went to this huge compound in Hollywood. The book is all centered on the girl and her father, and my character was lovable, but he didn't really have anything [that strange about him]. I said, "I want him to have some shadows, some darkness, something real that I can use," because I really didn't care. It turned out to be the smartest thing I ever did, and of course I was working with great people, but I started to evolve the character with Cameron [Crowe, who wrote and directed the film], and we worked on it together. It turned out so well that I thought, "Oh wait a minute, that works out pretty good." So, have you always had input in your characters in films you've done since then? Cusack: No. With this one, we didn't even touch the script, because it was so precise. And Cameron -- that was a great part, don't get me wrong, but by following some of my instincts and working with him, it worked out great, so I thought, "I've got to follow my gut here." [to Ramis] At what point in your career do you feel that you learned to follow your instincts and to trust your instincts? Ramis: From day one. From college, from realizing that there was no map out there. You know, we're raised to think that school is going to prepare us for something, or that someday, someone's going to tell us what to do, and we have this permanent record that's going to go with us, that we've been building. And when we take our little permanent record and someone's going to give us the career. Cusack: That goes all the way up to heaven, right? Ramis:Yeah, absolutely. I went to college in '62, so everything exploded, the '60s happened when I was in college. I came out in '66 and went to San Francisco, and suddenly... Cusack: Which was when I was born. Ramis: So you missed San Francisco. Cusack: Are you kidding me? I grew up in '80s America. That's why I have that Nietzschean blackness that I can access so well. I mean, you were in the Summer of Love and I was in a mall. Ramis: We were expanding our consciousness, we were realizing, "Hey, there are no rules to this. There isn't even any reality. Forget rules, reality doesn't even exist. This is all a big projection, and that means that, God, I'm actually responsible for what I do. No one's gonna tell me what to do, because by the way, when you're 18 -- well, I was 21 -- are you going to Vietnam or not? Are you gonna go in the Army? That was a big watershed moment where I had to say, "No, I'm not gonna do what they're telling me to do, I'm not going to become what society expects me to become, I'm even gonna break the law if I have to." So that was big. It was real big. And once I made that decision, once I burned my permanent record, I thought, "All right, I'm on my own." And that's very liberating. "I'm actually going to do what I want to do." And from that moment on ... And I had an ally. Michael Shamberg, who's a major film producer to this day, we were friends from the time we were 18 years old. We went through college together and toward the end of college we looked at each other and shook hands and said, "Let's never do anything we don't want to do, and let's never take a job we have to dress up for." Cusack: Now you've done both. And so have I! But in general, you adhere to these things. I think the way to think of it is dealing with control, it's about meeting with like-minded people and having a collaboration that creates something better than something you could've done on your own. It's such a collaborative thing. So if I can work with great people, that's kind of as good as it gets. -- By Heather Havrilesky 9:58:16 PM    comment []

Signe Wilkinson, Philadelphia Daily News   Oh, she didn't know Murtha was a Marine? Well OK, then.  You may recall that Jean Schmidt is the Eva Braun doppelganger who won a skin-of-her-teeth special election victory against Iraq War veteran Paul Hackett in an Ohio congressional district that usually runs about two-thirds Republican. Somebody ought to tell her that even Mad Dog Cheney is backing off efforts to swiftboat John Murtha. She apparently has plenty of enemies back in her home district, even in her own party, so it's probable that if she remains incapable of keeping her filthy mouth to herself she'll wind up a one-term wonder. Wouldn't that be sad.  Schmidt: An older, skankier Ann Coulter?   November 20, 2005 'Mean Jean' Goes to Washington, and Invites a Firestorm By JASON DePARLE, New York Times WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - She grew up in the rough-and-tumble of a family auto racing business, went through concealed-weapons training, and bears a local nickname seldom applied to shrinking violets: "Mean Jean." So when Representative Jean Schmidt, an Ohio Republican, created a furor on her 75th day in Congress by lobbing the word "coward" toward a Democratic war hero, those who know her best were anything but surprised. Just this week, a profile in The Hill newspaper, which covers Congress, labeled her "gloriously uncensored." Back home in her suburban Cincinnati district, the Whistleblower, an online newsletter that tracks local politics, rushed out a special I-told-you-so issue calling the speech "vintage Jean Schmidt." "We have said innumerable times that she would go to Washington and open her mouth and create an embarrassment," said Jim Schifrin, the newsletter's publisher. "She will say things that turn people off like nothing you've ever seen." Among those seemingly turned off was Ms. Schmidt, who quickly asked that her words be withdrawn from the Congressional record, even as they made headlines worldwide. The uproar arose Friday as the House debated a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of forces from Iraq. In scheduling the vote, Republicans were trying to embarrass Democratic critics of the war, forcing them to dissociate themselves from a call earlier in the week for a slower but still definite withdrawal. That call came from Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, a Vietnam combat veteran who spent 37 years in the Marines and is one of the most respected military authorities in the House. In attacking the Democrats' position, Ms. Schmidt, the newest member of Congress, said she had received a call from a Marine colonel, who "asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: that cowards cut and run, Marines never do." The House exploded in catcalls and jeers among outraged Democrats. When debate resumed, Ms. Schmidt retracted her comments and said, "I did not intend to suggest they applied to any member," especially Mr. Murtha. Ms. Schmidt could not be reached for comment on Saturday, with voice mailboxes full at all three of her offices. Her campaign manager did not return a phone call. Several Republicans who were on the House floor said afterward that Ms. Schmidt did not appear to know she was referring to a much-decorated veteran. "The poor lady didn't know Jack Murtha was a Marine - she really just ran into a hornet's nest," said Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia. Representative David Dreier of California said, "Very clearly, she did not know that Jack Murtha was a Marine." While the speech created a ruckus in Washington, it is not clear that it will hurt Ms. Schmidt back home, in a district that is one of the strongest Republican bastions in the country. "She's got higher name recognition than she did yesterday," Mr. Schifrin said. Ms. Schmidt squeaked into office in an election that many have called a fluke. The seat came open last spring when President Bush chose its incumbent, Rob Portman, as United States trade representative. A three-term state representative, Ms. Schmidt, the only woman in a crowded primary race, won that vote with 31 percent and then barely edged out the Democrat Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran, despite the lopsided Republican tilt of the district. She is widely expected to be challenged in a Republican primary when she seeks a full term in 2006. Then again, Ms. Schmidt, 53, is not one lacking in endurance. She counts among her achievements 58 marathons, the most recent completed in October. Her father, Gus Hoffman, was a race car driver, and she grew up boasting that she liked the smell of the racing pits. In her district, Ms. Schmidt has competing political identities. On one hand, she is known as a tough street fighter - the tactical "Mean Jean." Yet she has also been accused of not being Republican enough. Critics have called her a RINO - for Republican In Name Only - for supporting the unpopular Gov. Bob Taft, a Republican who has raised taxes. Among Ms. Schmidt's chief political interests is abortion, which she strongly opposes. "She's a very nice lady," said Jane Grimm, president of the Ohio Right to Life Society. "Jean's not afraid to stand up for what she believes in. I don't want to get into feminist lingo, but maybe because she's a woman they think she's mean, whereas if she was a man they'd say she was courageous." The 100-proof speech on the House floor may shore up Ms. Schmidt's standing inside her party's right flank. "I was listening to talk radio today, and people were calling in and praising her," said Chris Finney, a Cincinnati Republican allied with Ms. Schmidt's local rivals. "They like that jingoistic thinking." Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.  5:14:25 PM    comment []

From the Los Angeles Times:     THE CURVEBALL SAGA How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball' The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches. By Bob Drogin and John Goetz Special to The Times November 20, 2005 BERLIN — 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. According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said. 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. Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case. The German account emerges as the White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible and pernicious. In Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is resuming its long-stalled investigation of the administration's use of prewar intelligence. Committee members said last week that the Curveball case would be a key part of their review. House Democrats are calling for a similar inquiry. An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed. 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." 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." Many officials interviewed for this report, including the German intelligence officers, spoke on the condition they not be identified because they were bound by secrecy agreements, were not authorized to speak to the news media or because the case involved classified sources and methods. Curveball lives under an assumed name in southern Germany. The BND has given him a furnished apartment, language lessons and a stipend generous enough that he does not need to work. His wife has emigrated from Iraq, and they have an infant daughter. The BND has relocated him twice because of concerns that his life was in danger. They still watch him closely. "He is difficult to integrate" into local society, said a BND operations officer. "We are still busy with him." Curveball could not be interviewed for this report. BND officials threatened last summer to strip him of his salary, housing and protection if he agreed to meet with The Times. "We told him, 'If you talk to anyone on the outside… you are out and you get no more help from us,' " the BND supervisor said. 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. German journey The Curveball chronicle began in November 1999, when the dark-haired Iraqi in his late 20s flew into Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport with a tourist visa. The Baghdad-born chemical engineer promptly applied for political asylum in Arabic and halting English. He told German immigration officials he had embezzled Iraqi government money and faced prison or worse if sent home. The Germans sent him to Zirndorf, a refugee center near Nuremberg once used for Soviet defectors, where he joined a long line of Iraqi exiles seeking German visas. Abruptly, his story changed. He once led a team, he told BND officers, that equipped trucks to brew deadly bio-agents. He named six sites where Iraq might be hiding biological warfare vehicles. Three already were operating. A farm program to boost crop yields was cover for Iraq's new biological weapons production program, he said. Germany provided Europe's most generous benefits to Iraqi refugees, and several hundred arrived each month. But few had useful credible intelligence on Baghdad's suspected weapons programs. Intelligence agents became accustomed to exaggerated claims. "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.'' But for this defector, the Germans assigned two case officers as well as a team of chemists, biologists and other experts. They debriefed him from January 2000 to September 2001. Since the Iraqi had arrived in Munich, U.S. liaison with German intelligence was assigned to the local DIA team. Their clandestine operating base was an elegant 19th century mansion known as Munich House. There he was assigned his codename: Curveball. The base cryptonym "ball" was used to signify weapons, two former U.S. intelligence officials said. An earlier informant in Germany, for example, was called Matchball. In DIA files, Iraqi sources were listed as "red" if U.S. intelligence could interview them. Curveball was a "blue" source, meaning the Germans would not permit U.S. access to him. Curveball said he hated Americans, the Germans explained. As a result, the DIA — like the BND — never tried to check Curveball's background or verify his accounts before sending reports to other U.S. intelligence agencies. Despite that failure, CIA analysts accepted the incoming reports as credible and quickly passed them to senior policymakers. The reports had problems, however. The Germans usually interviewed Curveball in Arabic, using a translator, although the Iraqi sometimes spoke English. "But a case officer wants to speak directly to his source," said the senior BND officer. "Curveball began to learn German, and thus there was a big mix [of languages] that went on. This explains some of the confusion." It got worse, like a children's game of "telephone," in which information gets increasingly distorted. The BND sent German summaries of their English and Arabic interview reports to Munich House and to British intelligence. The DIA team translated the German back to English and prepared its own summaries. Those went to DIA's directorate for human intelligence, at a high-rise office in Clarendon, Va. Clarendon passed 95 DIA reports to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, at CIA headquarters in nearby Langley. Experts there called other specialists, including an independent laboratory, to help evaluate the data. Spy satellites were directed to focus on Curveball's sites. CIA artists prepared detailed drawings from Curveball's crude sketches. The system led to confusion, not clarity. "Analysts were studying drawings made by artists working from descriptions by a guy we couldn't talk to," explained a former senior CIA official who helped supervise the case and the postwar investigation. "It was hard to figure out." "Our fear is that as it was analyzed and translated and reanalyzed and retranslated, and comments got added, it could have gotten sexed up by accident," agreed a former CIA operations official. The British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, blamed the BND for omitting what a Parliamentary inquiry called "significant detail" in the reports they sent to London. At issue were Curveball's trucks. In an e-mail to The Times, Robin Butler, head of the British inquiry into prewar intelligence, said "incomplete reporting" by the BND misled the British to assume the trucks could produce weapons-grade bio-agents such as anthrax spores. But Curveball only spoke of producing a liquid slurry unsuitable for bombs or warheads. At the CIA, bio-warfare experts viewed the defector's reports as sophisticated and technically feasible. They also matched the analysts' expectations. After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad's secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection. American U-2 spy planes looked for suspicious vehicles, and U.N. teams raided parking lots. In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: "Tip Top Ice Cream." Inside they found ice cream. "We thought they could easily transport other materials around," said Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1997. Finally, in mid-1995, Iraq officials admitted that before the Gulf War they had secretly produced 30,000 liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and other lethal bio-agents. They had deployed hundreds of germ-filled munitions and researched other deadly diseases for military use. They denied they ever had mobile production facilities. Curveball's story to the Germans in 2000 and 2001 neatly dovetailed with that history and continuing CIA suspicions. The Iraqi defector said he was recruited out of engineering school at Baghdad University in 1994 by Iraq's Military Industrial Commission, headed by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil. He said he went to work the following year for "Dr. Germ," British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha, to build bio-warfare vehicles. Kamil and Taha had headed the pre-1991 bio-weapons program. Curveball said he was assigned to the Chemical Engineering and Design Center, behind the Rashid Hotel in central Baghdad. That also fit a pattern, as the center provided a cover story for Iraq's first bio-warfare program . Curveball said he had helped assemble one truck-mounted germ factory in 1997 at Djerf al Nadaf, a tumble-down cluster of warehouses in a gritty industrial area 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. He helped the Germans build a scale model of the facility, showing how vehicles were hidden in a two-story building — and how they entered and exited on either end. He designed laboratory equipment for the trucks, he said, providing dimensions, temperature ranges and other details. He sketched diagrams of how the system operated, and identified more than a dozen co-workers. But the story had holes . "His information to us was very vague," said the senior German intelligence official. "He could not say if these things functioned, if they worked." Curveball also said he could not identify what microbes the trucks were designed to produce. "He didn't know … whether it was anthrax or not," said the BND supervisor. "He had nothing to do with actual production of [a biological] agent. He was in the equipment testing phase. And the equipment worked." David Kay, who read the Curveball file when he headed the CIA's search for hidden weapons in 2003, said Curveball's accounts were maddeningly murky. "He was not in charge of trucks or production," Kay said. "He had nothing to do with actual production of biological agent. He never saw them actually produce [an] agent." But the CIA and the White House overlooked the holes in the story. In a February 2003 radio address and statement, Bush warned that "first-hand witnesses have informed us that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare. With these, Bush said, "Iraq could produce within just months hundreds of pounds of biological poisons." Curveball had told the Germans that Taha's team planned to build mobile factories at six sites across Iraq, from Numaniyah in the south to Tikrit in the north. But he visited only Djerf al Nadaf, he said. His information about the other sites, he told the Germans, was second-hand. Flawed witness Curveball's reports were highly valued in Washington because the CIA had no Iraqi spies with access to weapons programs at the time. One detail particularly impressed the CIA: Curveball's report of a 1998 germ weapons accident at Djerf al Nadaf. Powell cited the incident in his prewar U.N. speech. An "eyewitness" was "at the site" when an accident occurred, and 12 technicians "died from exposure to biological agents," Powell said. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, then Powell's chief of staff, said senior CIA officials told Powell the "principal source had not only worked in mobile labs but had seen an accident and had been injured in the accident…. This gave more credibility to it." But German intelligence officials said the CIA was wrong. Curveball only "heard rumors of an accident," the BND supervisor said. "He gave a third-hand account." The incident led to the first questions inside the CIA about Curveball's credibility. In May 2000, the Germans allowed a doctor from the CIA's counter-proliferation branch to meet Curveball and draw a blood sample. Antibodies in the blood could indicate if he had been exposed to anthrax or other unusual pathogens in the accident. The medical tests were inconclusive, but the meeting was memorable. The BND, insisting Curveball spoke no English and would not meet Americans, introduced the doctor as a German. The CIA physician remained silent, because he was not fluent in German. He was surprised, he later told others, that Curveball spoke "excellent English" to others in the room. Moreover, Curveball was "very emotional, very excitable," the doctor told one colleague. And although it was early morning, Curveball smelled of liquor and looked "very sick" from a stiff hangover. German intelligence officials said Curveball didn't have a drinking problem. But they had other concerns. Like many defectors, Curveball at first seemed eager to please. He thanked his new friends and laughed at their jokes. He was charming and clearly intelligent, providing complex engineering details. But as the questions intensified, Curveball grew moody and irritable. His memory began to fail. He confused places and dates. He fretted about his personal safety, about his parents and wife in Baghdad, and about his future in Germany. "He was between two worlds, sometimes cooperative, sometimes aggressive," said the BND supervisor. "He was not an easy-going guy." Curveball largely ceased cooperating in 2001 after he was granted asylum, officials said. He would refuse to meet for days, and then weeks, at a time. He also increasingly asked for money. "He knew he was important," said the BND analyst. "He was not an idiot." Defectors are often problem sources. Viewed as traitors back home, many embellish their stories to gain favor with spy services. In the shadow world of intelligence, Curveball's inability or reluctance to provide many details actually helped convince analysts he was telling the truth. Had Curveball claimed expertise with biological weapons or direct access to other secret programs, said the BND analyst, "It would be easier to assume he was lying." A former British official involved with the case said Curveball's behavior should be seen through another lens. He is convinced that Curveball was under intense stress, terrified both that his visa scam would be exposed, and that his lies would be used to start a war. "He must have been scared out of his mind," he said. But concerns about Curveball's reliability were growing. In early 2001, the CIA's Berlin station chief sent a message to headquarters noting that a BND official had complained that the Iraqi was "out of control," and couldn't be located, Senate investigators found. MI6 cabled the CIA that British intelligence "is not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source" and that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical of … fabricators,'' the presidential commission reported. British intelligence also warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when Curveball claimed to be working at Djerf al Nadaf conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks from getting in or out. U.S. and German officials feared that Ahmad Chalabi had coached Curveball after the defector said his brother had worked as a bodyguard for the controversial Iraqi exile leader. But they found no evidence. Curveball "had very little contact with his [bodyguard] brother," the BND supervisor said. "They are not close.'' More problematic were the three sources the CIA said had corroborated Curveball's story. Two had ties to Chalabi. All three turned out to be frauds. The most important, a former major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was deemed a liar by the CIA and DIA. In May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in U.S. intelligence databases. Powell said he was never warned, during three days of intense briefings at CIA headquarters before his U.N. speech, that he was using material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false. "As you can imagine, I was not pleased," Powell said. "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it." But BND officials said their U.S. colleagues repeatedly assured them Curveball's story had been corroborated. "They kept on telling us there were three or four sources," said the senior German intelligence official. "They said it many times." Behind the scenes, the CIA stepped up pressure to interview Curveball. The BND finally accepted a compromise in the fall of 2002. They let CIA analysts send questions, but they could not interview the Iraqi. The frustration was intense at the CIA. But it wasn't surprising. Relations long have been rocky between the CIA and BND, officials in both spy services acknowledged. The friction dates to the Cold War, when the BND complained it was treated as a second-class agency. Spy services jealously guard their sources, and the BND was not obligated to share access to Curveball. "We would never let them see one of ours," said the former CIA operations officer. Intelligence shift Despite the lack of access or any new reports from Curveball, U.S. intelligence sharply upgraded its assessments of Iraq's biological weapons before the war. The shift is reflected in declassified portions of National Intelligence Estimates, which are produced as the authoritative judgment of the 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. In May 1999, before Curveball defected, a national intelligence estimate on worldwide biological warfare programs said Iraq was "probably continuing work to develop and produce BW [bio-warfare] agents," and could restart production in six months. In December 2000, after a year of Curveball's reports, another national intelligence estimate cautiously noted that "new intelligence" had caused U.S. intelligence "to adjust our assessment upward" and "suggests Baghdad has expanded'' its bio-weapons program. But the caveats disappeared after the Sept. 11 attacks and the still-unsolved mailing of anthrax-laced letters to several U.S. states. Iraq "continues to produce at least … three BW agents" and its mobile germ factories provide "capabilities surpassing the pre-Gulf War era," the CIA weapons center warned in October 2001. The CIA followed up with a public White Paper and briefings for the White House and three Senate committees. The CIA hadn't seen new intelligence on Iraq's germ weapons. Instead, analysts had estimated what they believed would be the maximum output from seven mobile labs — only one of which Curveball said he had seen — operating nonstop or six months. But even Curveball's description of a single lab was a fiction. Similar misjudgments filled the most important prewar intelligence document, the National Intelligence Estimate issued in October 2002. It was sent to Congress days before lawmakers voted to authorize use of military force if Hussein refused to give up his illicit arsenal. For the first time, the new estimate warned with "high confidence" that Iraq "has now established large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capabilities." It said "all key aspects" of Iraq's offensive BW program "are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War." The assessment was based "largely on information from a single source — Curveball," the presidential commission concluded. It was one of "the most important and alarming" judgments in the document, the panel added. And it was utterly wrong. A handful of bio-analysts in the weapons center, part of the CIA's intelligence directorate, controlled the Curveball reports and remained confident in their veracity. But across the CIA bureaucracy, the clandestine service officers who usually handle defectors and other human sources were increasingly skeptical. Tyler Drumheller, then the head of CIA spying in Europe, called the BND station chief at the German embassy in Washington in September 2002 seeking access to Curveball. Drumheller and the station chief met for lunch at the German's favorite seafood restaurant in upscale Georgetown. The German officer warned that Curveball had suffered a mental breakdown and was "crazy," the now-retired CIA veteran recalled. "He said, first off, 'They won't let you see him,' " Drumheller said. " 'Second, there are a lot of problems. Principally, we think he's probably a fabricator.' " The BND station chief, contacted by The Times during the summer, said he could not "discuss any of this." He has since been reassigned back to Germany. His BND supervisors declined to discuss the lunch meeting. Drumheller, a veteran of 26 years in the CIA clandestine service, said he and several aides repeatedly raised alarms after the lunch in tense exchanges with CIA analysts working on the Curveball case. "The fact is, there was a lot of yelling and screaming about this guy," said James Pavitt, then chief of clandestine services, who retired from the CIA in August 2004. "My people were saying, 'We think he's a stinker.' " The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting. Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information. "Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found. The supervisor later told them he was only voicing his opinion that war appeared inevitable. Tenet has denied receiving warnings that Curveball might be a fabricator. He declined to be interviewed for this report. Powell said that at the time he prepared for his U.N. speech in early 2003, no one warned him of the debate inside the CIA over Curveball's credibility. "I was being as careful as I possibly could," he said. Working from a CIA conference room adjoining CIA Director Tenet's seventh-floor office suite, Powell and his aides repeatedly challenged the credibility of CIA evidence — including the mobile germ factories. "We pressed as hard as we could, and the CIA stood by it adamantly," Powell recalled. "This is one we really pressed on, really spent a lot time on…. We knew how important it was." No smoking gun 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." A congressional staffer on intelligence said she realized the case was weak when she saw Powell display CIA drawings of trucks but not photos. "A drawing isn't evidence," she said. "It's hearsay." 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. Djerf al Nadaf was on a dusty road lined with auto repair shops and small factories, near the former Tuwaitha nuclear facility and a sewage-filled tributary of the Tigris River. Behind a high wall, a two-story grain silo adjoined the warehouse that Curveball had identified as the truck assembly facility. "That's the one where the mobile labs were supposed to be," said a former U.N. inspector who worked with the U.S. and other intelligence agencies. "That's the one we were interested in." The doors were locked, so Boston microbiologist Rocco Casagrande climbed on a white U.N. vehicle, yanked open a metal flap in the wall, and crawled inside. After scrambling over a huge pile of corn, he scraped two samples of residue from cracks in the cement floor, two more from holes in the wall and one from a discarded shower basin outside. Back at the Canal Hotel that afternoon, he tested the samples for bacterial or viral DNA. He was searching for any signs that germs were produced at the site or any traces of the 1998 bio-weapons accident. Test results were all negative. "No threat agents detected," Casagrande wrote in his computer journal that night. "Got to climb on a jeep and crawl into buildings and play second-story man, but otherwise spent the day in the lab." A British inspector, who had helped bring the intelligence file from New York, found another surprise. Curveball had said the germ trucks could enter the warehouse from either end. But there were no garage doors and a solid, 6-foot-high wall surrounded most of the building. The wall British intelligence saw in 1997 satellite photos clearly made impossible the traffic patterns Curveball had described. 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. The invasion of Iraq began two weeks later. Phantom labs Soon after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, the discovery of two trucks loaded with lab equipment in northern Iraq brought cheers to the CIA weapons center. Curveball examined photos relayed to Germany and said that while he hadn't worked on the two trucks, equipment in the pictures looked like components he had installed at Djerf al Nadaf. Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction." But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment." The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper. Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical. "The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there." The trucks were built to generate hydrogen, not germs, he said. But the CIA refused to back down. In March 2004, Killip quit, protesting that the CIA was covering up the truth. Rod Barton, an Australian intelligence officer and another bio-weapons expert, also quit over what he said was the CIA's refusal to admit error. "Of course the trailers had nothing to do with Curveball," Barton wrote in a recent e-mail. The Iraq Survey Group ultimately agreed. An "exhaustive investigation" showed the trailers could not "be part of any BW program," it reported in October 2004. The now-discredited CIA White Paper remains on the agency's website. A CIA spokesman said the report was posted because it was part of the historical record. After U.S troops failed to find illicit Iraqi weapons in the days and weeks after the invasion, the CIA created the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search in June 2003. Tenet appointed Kay to head it. The pugnacious Texan was convinced that Baghdad had hidden mobile germ factories. Kay's teams returned to Djerf al Nadaf and other sites identified by Curveball. 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. Childhood friends called him a "great liar" and a "con artist." Another called him "a real operator." The team reported that "people kept saying what a rat Curveball was." Jerry and another CIA analyst abruptly broke off the investigation and took a military flight back to Washington. Kay said Jerry appeared to be nearing a nervous breakdown. "They had been true believers in Curveball," Kay said. "They absolutely believed in him. They knew every detail in his file. But it was total hokum. There was no truth in it. They said they had to go home to explain how all this was all so wrong. They wanted to fight the battle at the CIA." Back home, senior CIA officials resisted. Jerry was "read the riot act" and accused of "making waves" by his office director, according to the presidential commission. He and his colleague ultimately were transferred out of the weapons center. The CIA was "very, very vindictive," Kay said. Soon after, Jerry got in touch with Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who felt he had been sidelined for criticizing CIA counterterrorism tactics. Scheuer would quit within a year. "Jerry had become kind of a nonperson," Scheuer recalled of their meeting. "There was a tremendous amount of pressure on him not to say anything. Just to sit there and shut up." A CIA spokeswoman confirmed the account, but declined to comment further. Jerry still works at the CIA and could not be contacted for this report. His former supervisor, reached at home, said she could not speak to the media. "What was done to them was wrong," said a former Pentagon official who investigated the case for the presidential commission. "But we didn't see it so much as a cover-up as an expression of how profoundly resistant to recognizing mistakes the CIA culture was." Kay's findings In December 2003, Kay flew back to CIA headquarters. He said he told Tenet that Curveball was a liar and he was convinced Iraq had no mobile labs or other illicit weapons. CIA officials confirm their exchange. Kay said he was assigned to a windowless office without a working telephone. On Jan. 20, 2004, Bush lauded Kay and the Iraq Survey Group in his State of the Union Speech for finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction program would continue to this day." Kay quit three days later and went public with his concerns. In Germany, the BND finally agreed to let the CIA interview Curveball. The CIA sent one of its best officers, fluent in German and gifted at working reluctant sources. They met at BND headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich, in mid-March 2004 — one year after the Iraq invasion. Alone with Curveball at last, the CIA officer steadily reviewed details and picked at contradictions like a prosecutor working a hostile witness. He showed spy satellite images and other evidence from the sites Curveball had identified. Each night, he would file an encrypted report to CIA headquarters on his computer, and then call Drumheller. "After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a bunch of stuff.' " But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking. "He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come home.' " It took more than a month to track and recall every U.S. intelligence report — at least 100 in all — based on Curveball's misinformation. In a blandly worded notice to its stations around the world, the CIA said in May 2004: "Discrepancies surfaced regarding the information provided by … Curveball in this stream of reporting, which indicate that he lost his claimed access in 1995. Our assessment, therefore, is that Curveball appears to be fabricating in this stream of reporting." The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." U.S., British and German intelligence officials still debate what Curveball really saw, and what he really did. One possible answer was buried in records the Iraq Survey Group recovered at the engineering and design center in Baghdad. They show that Iraqi officials considered installing seed handling gear on trucks in 1995, but instead put the machinery in warehouses, like those at Djerf al Nadaf. Perhaps Curveball heard about the modified trucks and spun them into a bio-weapons system for gullible intelligence agencies. "You're left at the end with uncertainty," said the former CIA official who helped supervise the Curveball case and the postwar investigation. "We know what he said. We know we don't believe him. But was he making it all up? Was he coached? Did he hear something and then embellish it? These things are still unresolved." Not for Curveball. "He is convinced his story is true," said the BND analyst. "He has no doubts to this day." Drogin is a Times staff writer. Goetz is a special correspondent. Also contributing to this report from Baghdad was staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman. 4:46:21 PM    comment []

The Daou Report by Peter Daou NEW THE STRAW MEN OF IRAQ: Ten Pro-War Fallacies Friday's hastily staged congressional vote on withdrawal from Iraq may have been designed to embarrass John Murtha, but the raucous session offered valuable insight into the various rationales for war and the tactics used to attack Democrats who oppose Bush's Iraq policy. A parade of House Republicans went after the Dems and laid out a surprisingly weak case for the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Here, in my view, are ten of the leading pro-war fallacies... 1. VIRTUALLY EVERYONE WHO SAW THE INTELLIGENCE BELIEVED SADDAM HAD WMD, THEREFORE BUSH IS BEING UNFAIRLY SINGLED OUT FOR CRITICISM The typical framing is: "Democrats got the same intelligence and reached the same conclusion, so blaming Bush for misleading America is purely political." The argument is also presented in 'gotcha' form by people like Sean Hannity, who use a lengthy blind quote about the threat posed by Saddam that turns out to be from Bill Clinton, John Kerry or some other Democrat. The conclusion is that if Bush was lying, they must have been lying too. There is a false assumption underlying this argument, namely that Dems received the same intel as Bush (they didn't), but setting that aside, here are two reasons why this is a straw man: a) The issue is not whether people believed Saddam had WMD (many did), or whether there was any evidence that he had WMD (there was), it's the fact that Bush and his administration made an absolute, unconditional case with the evidence at hand, brooking no dissent and dismissing doubters inside and outside the government as cowardly or treasonous. That's what "manipulating the intelligence" and "misleading the public" refers to, the knowing exaggeration of the case for war (whether by cherry-picking intel or using defunct intel or by speaking about ambiguous intel in alarming absolutes). As I wrote in this post: "There we were, more than a decade after the first gulf war, two years after 9/11, and Saddam hadn’t attacked us, he hadn’t threatened to attack us. And then suddenly, he was the biggest threat to America. A threat that required a massive invasion. A bigger threat than Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Bin Laden. A HUGE, IMMEDIATE threat. It simply defied belief."  b) In addition to the fear-mongering described above, the contention that Bush 'misled' the public is not simply about Saddam's WMD, but about the way the administration stormed ahead with their plans and invaded Iraq in the way they did, at the time they did, with the Pollyannaish visions they fed the world, all the while demonizing dissent and smearing their critics. In both (a) and (b), the crux of the issue is proportionality. Whether or not Bill Clinton or France or the U.N. believed Saddam was a threat, the administration's apocalyptic words and drastic actions (preemptively invading a sovereign nation) were decidedly out of proportion to the level and immediacy of the threat. THAT is the issue. 2. AFTER 9/11, WE CAN'T WAIT FOR THE THREAT TO MATERIALIZE BEFORE TAKING ACTION This is often used as a counterpoint to the notion that Bush overhyped the rationale for war. It's a vacuous argument whose logic implies we should invade a half-dozen African countries as well as North Korea, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Every day that goes by that Bush allows these threats to "materialize," he is failing in his duties to protect the American public and should be impeached. And if the pushback is that North Korea and others are being dealt with diplomatically, isn't that exactly the approach this argument purports to refute? Furthermore, the war's opponents never claimed they'd prefer to "wait" for threats to materialize. This is another straw man. Nobody wants to wait for threats to materialize; they just want to deal with them differently. 3. DEMOCRATS "VOTED FOR" AND THUS "SUPPORTED" THE WAR The Iraq War Resolution (IWR) debate has been flogged to death, so there's no need to fully resurrect it here. Suffice it to say that: a) Many elected Democrats did NOT vote in favor of the resolution. Not to mention the millions of rank and filers who marched down the streets of our cities and were largely ignored by the press and brushed off by Bush. So to say, generically, that Democrats "supported the war" or to imply that there was tepid resistance to it, is false. b) No matter how many people contest this point, a vote to give Bush authority WAS NOT a vote "for war." Bush also had the authority NOT to invade. Since Republicans are so fond of quoting John Kerry in support of the case for WMD, here are his words on the floor of the Senate the day of the Iraq War Resolution vote. "In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out. "If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize "imminent''--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs. "Prime Minister Tony Blair has recognized a similar need to distinguish how we approach this. He has said that he believes we should move in concert with allies, and he has promised his own party that he will not do so otherwise. The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. And it is what can be done. If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed. "Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances."  Not exactly an endorsement of Bush's approach or a vote "for war." And a good retort to those who argue that Democrats are "rewriting history."  4. TALK OF WITHDRAWAL "SENDS THE WRONG MESSAGE" AND "EMBOLDENS THE ENEMY" To borrow Samuel Johnson's immortal words, this argument, like (false) patriotism, is the "last refuge of scoundrels." Implying that opposing views are treasonous is the surest way to stifle dissent. And it's a cheap way to avoid confronting hard questions. Such as: Does anyone seriously believe that Bush's course of action in Iraq has intimidated or deterred the enemy? Doesn't the fact that the insurgency is as strong as ever "embolden" the enemy? The sobering truth is that there are dozens of recent events and actions that 'embolden the enemy' far more than advocating a disciplined, phased redeployment. Torture of detainees, the use of white phosphorus as an offensive weapon, the curtailing of civil liberties at home, the shameful abandonment of American citizens in the aftermath of Katrina, the cynical outing of CIA agents, the smearing of war critics as traitors, these are far more encouraging to America's enemies. If we are truly engaged in a clash of civilizations, an epic battle against "Islamofascism," then our enemies are far more interested in the destruction of those things that are quintessentially American and that give us the moral high ground (freedom of speech, adherence to international law, upholding ethical norms and standards, respect for human rights, etc.) than strategic redeployment in Iraq. 5. A WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ WOULD HAVE CATASTROPHIC CONSEQUENCES If I learned anything from living in Beirut, it's that predicting the outcome of sectarian divisions in the Middle East is a fool's game. The shifting alliances, the internal pressures, the regional influences, make it next to impossible to say whether or not the removal of American forces would further destabilize Iraq. It's also grimly amusing that we're expected to believe the prognostications of the very people who told us we'd be greeted as liberators. For every foreign policy expert who says that Iraq will be worse off without U.S. troops, there's another who will tell you the exact opposite is true. In the absence of any sound predictive capabilities, the endgame should be based on the opening: i.e. the sooner you end something that started out wrong and has had terrible consequences, the better. For those who counter with the Pottery Barn rule (we broke it we should fix it), the question is: What's the statute of limitations on that rule? What if we can't fix what's broken in Iraq? Is there a point at which we acknowledge we can't fix it and stop trying? Is our attempt to 'fix' Iraq breaking it even further? Also, are there other things we've broken that we're obliged to fix before we try to fix Iraq? Is there a reason our limited resources should go to fixing Iraq and not saving poor, sick, and hungry children in America? 6. WITHDRAWING FROM IRAQ IS TANTAMOUNT TO "CUTTING & RUNNING" Any talk of withdrawal, redeployment or a change in course is characterized as "cutting and running." This word-play is so disingenuous that it hardly merits a rebuttal, but the best response to the notion that a war hero like John Kerry or John Murtha wants to "cut and run" is Murtha's response to Cheney: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done."  A phased withdrawal is just that, a phased withdrawal. And a timetable is just that, a timetable. Using politically-charged buzzwords won't change the fact that the present course of action is untenable. It is the height of folly to continue on a tragic and deadly path just to save face. And as we pointed out in #3, enough has been done to "embolden the enemy" that leaving Iraq will have little effect in that regard. For those who think continuing with the current policy in Iraq is a mark of courage and changing direction the mark of cowardice, they should bear in mind that courage tempered by wisdom is noble, courage in defiance of wisdom is foolhardy. 7. WE'RE FIGHTING THEM 'THERE' SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM HERE No matter how many times reality intrudes on this fantasy, it's still one of the favored arguments by the war's supporters. And it was repeated more than once in the House debate. This is yet another straw man: we all agree that it's better to fight our enemies somewhere other than on the streets of America. The problem with the "fight them there" approach is that: a) Iraq wasn't "there" until AFTER the invasion. (In spite of the mental contortions of Bush apologists who insist there was a substantive Saddam-Qaeda connection.) b) Our policy in Iraq is creating more of "them." c) "There" is where "them" (Bin Laden and his cohorts) are. And it ain't Iraq. A corollary to this argument is that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror" and we can't defeat the terrorists if we don't fight them there. That's like walking into someone's house, breaking an expensive vase, and claiming you have to move in because your job is to clean up broken vases and as long as vases are being broken, you have to be there to clean up the mess. Arguments don't get more circular than this... And if remaining in Iraq is really about Bush's resolve to defend America against our enemies by keeping them away from the mainland, let's not forget what Katrina's aftermath tells us about how well this administration is preparing for domestic threats. Imagine the holes in domestic security that could be plugged with the toil and treasure being spent in Iraq. 8. DEMOCRATS DON'T HAVE A PLAN FOR IRAQ, THEY'RE JUST ATTACKING BUSH TO SCORE POLITICAL POINTS Democrats deserve legitimate criticism for their approach to Iraq, but when the Republican Party controls all branches of government, attacking Dems for conflicting positions and a confused message shouldn't be a catch-all excuse for Republican mistakes and lies. Saying Democrats are muddled on Iraq is a favorite media distraction. But the response is simple: if Bush's policy is to "stay the course," the Democratic policy - whether we accept Murtha's approach or Feingold's or Kerry's - is to "change the course." Simple enough. Changing positions in light of new evidence and new circumstances is the sign of a mature and rational mind. Stubbornly clinging to a failed course of action is not. It's fascinating how Democrats are always the ones held to account for their Iraq vote, but not Republicans. The question constantly put to Dems, "you voted for it, now you're against it," has a straightforward answer, as phrased by a Democratic senator: "we authorized Bush to put the bullet in the gun, not to shoot us in the foot." We've been shot in the foot by the administration's Iraq policy. Democrats are rightfully reacting to that. The real question - to Republicans - is this: "You voted for this war based on Saddam's threat to America. The threat never materialized. Was your decision wrong? And does your lockstep allegiance to Bush's failed policy make you personally responsible for further deaths beyond the 2000+ American troops who have already given their lives?" 9. HISTORY WILL VINDICATE BUSH The infinite time horizon is an easy cop out for supporters of the Iraq war. I wrote this in August: "The problem with the Bush apologists' reasoning is that using an infinite time horizon - which they are so fond of - virtually any action, no matter how egregious, can be shown to lead to some positive results. It’s the bastardization of utilitarianism; asserting a causal relationship between a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation and all future good developments in Iraq and the Middle East may swell the hawks' breasts with pride, but it's a dubious and dangerous way to conduct foreign policy. Which is precisely why we need to adhere so strictly to the rule of law, to basic moral precepts, and to established principles of international relations, something that this administration has failed to do, and that the administration's supporters can dance around but can't justify."  10. ISN'T IT A GOOD THING THAT SADDAM IS GONE? This is the ultimate fall-back for supporters of this disastrous war. Somber references to mass graves, Saddam gassing his people, liberating the Iraqis from a dictator, spreading freedom, etc., are second only to flag-waving and bumper-sticker "support" for the troops when it comes to feel-good justifications for the fiasco in Iraq. To human rights activists, this faux-bleeding heart conservatism rings hollow. Considering the unremitting suffering and killing and violence and abuse of innocents that takes place on this planet, it is intellectually dishonest to resort to a retroactive humanitarian rationalization for a war that was ostensibly defensive in nature. Especially when we callously ignore the plight of so many others who suffer in silence. If the trump card question is "don’t you think it's good that Saddam is gone?" then one rhetorical question can be met with another: Isn't it terrible that we've done nothing to stop the slaughter in Darfur? Isn't it terrible that Iraq is still a killing field and now a terrorist breeding ground? Isn't it terrible that a nuclear armed Kim Jong Il is still in power? Isn't it terrible that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Iraq could have saved millions of starving children instead of killing tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis? And so on... =========== POSTSCRIPT: Washington is suddenly convulsed by a debate that should have taken place three years ago, and the sleeping giant known as the American public is finally awakening to the deceptions that led to war. Emotion, instinct, and other proclivities may be the driving force behind support or opposition for war, but reason and logic are the means by which we try to prove the correctness of our views. No matter how heartfelt, the arguments in favor of the Iraq war are almost always specious and riddled with fallacious reasoning. On a matter so grave, that should be unacceptable to the American people. Judging from the polls, it is. 10:55:54 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Michael D. Zungolo. Last update: 12/1/2005; 11:08:20 AM.