Maine Owl

Infamous red-letter day


February 5, 2003: "Secretary of State Powell, using a mock-up of anthrax during a Security Council presentation, believes weapons will be found." (Photo and caption, CBS News)

I've written extensively over at the old blog on the Iraq presentation former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave on February 5. I am placing a time line of selected highlights below the fold.

I do want to recommend THIS Democracy Now! program from just a few days ago too. It featured Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin talking about his new book, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War. Here's Drogin:

I think this is sort of the defining case of how we got led down the rabbit hole in Iraq. Curveball is the codename of an Iraqi—Rafiq Alwan is his name—who was a chemical engineer who defected to Germany, fled to Germany in 1999 and told the German intelligence authorities that Saddam—that he had helped mastermind a scheme to build biological weapons for Saddam Hussein. That information was never confirmed. It was never vetted. It was just sort of put out there and handed over to the Americans. ...

When you go back and you look at Colin Powell’s speech—we’re coming up to the fifth anniversary of it next month—and you go back and you read it now, and it’s entirely based on this document that the CIA put out a couple months earlier, this National Intelligence Estimate, it’s wrong on almost every single level. And that’s based on what the CIA gave him. So, you know, I don’t think it—to me, it’s not the issue of a couple of guys, it’s that this system was so utterly corrupt.

Curveball? CURVEBALL! CURRRVVVVEEBBBALLLLL!!!!

That's what the American people believed when they believed Powell. They believed in Curveball, who Powell said conveyed information that was "backed up by sources, solid sources." Powell went on, "These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." These statements earn Powell a resting place in hell.

On a personal note, I recall the day well. I had textbook work going and I was in the Bat Cave punching stuff into the computer. It was entirely obvious that the whole thing was completely fitted up, as Robert Fisk and the media watch group FAIR reported on that day and shortly thereafter, Fisk likening the absurdity of the performance to something out of Beckett.

I spoke with a old friend from Minnesota that evening. As I recall we were not so stunned that Powell had spewed baloney, but that the media case was "open and shut," as FAIR put it, "a failure of skepticism." That failure was what was truly astonishing.

Washington and its messengers obviously wanted a war for the purpose of taking and controlling Iraq. But to this day you know what? That notion, that the war was about taking an oil-rich country by force, is still little examined in media and academic circles, unless you count the "far out" statements last fall by former head banker Alan Greenspan.

Below are some key stops on the time line from February 5, 2003 on. They are just a few highlights of a much larger story. Many of the references comes from archives of the old blog, Deep Blade, where lots of good information on this still exists. [The time line is now final.]

February 5, 2003
Powell speaks to the U.N: "Today, Iraq still poses a threat and Iraq still remains in material breach. Indeed, by its failure to seize on its one last opportunity to come clean and disarm, Iraq has put itself in deeper material breach and closer to the day when it will face serious consequences for its continue defiance of this Council. My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens. We have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war. We wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give Iraq one last chance. Iraq is not, so far, taking that one last chance. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body." [emphasis added, my GOD what an Orwellian sham!]

February 8, 2003
Powell's case is made a total shambles when it is revealed by Middle East analyst Glen Rangwala that a British dossier Powell used to support the notion that Iraq was hiding its weapons was cribbed off of websites and reflected pre-1991 documents. Rangwala's Claims and evaluations of Iraq's proscribed weapons is still the best source for contemporaneous pre-war analysis of Powell's claims. It completely undermines those who now like to argue that "everyone" thought Saddam had WMD.

February 11, 2003
Issue #1 of Deep Blade News posts to the new Internet domain, deepblade.net. The first issue gives reasons why war is wrong, and why it is Colin Powell who should be called a "deceiver." That post would be extensively revised a month later to catch up with events.

February 24, 2003
Powell had claimed that Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law who later was executed by Saddam, was a credible source. Newsweek reports that a previously secret document reporting what Kamel actually told investigators, that Iraq had indeed destroyed all of its unconventional weapons, completely undermined Powell's case.

March 7, 2003
Powell's case did not play well with the international community, especially the supposed "mobile bioweapons labs. On this Friday, UNMOVIC weapons inspection reports were given by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog to the Security Council. Blix said, "Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities has so far been found." ElBaradei then revealed the Niger document fraud (I'll write more on this on March 7). Powell's diplomatic case for war totally collapses. No "second" U.N. resolution is possible. This is the strongest rebuke to the United States in the entire history of the U.N.

March 16, 2003
On the eve of the invasion and after the complete collapse of Powell's case, U.S. Senator Olympia Snowe sends a representative to a Bangor community meeting who there gives us Snowe's words, "On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the UN Security Council with clear, convincing, specific, well-corroborated evidence that Iraq has failed to comply with UN resolutions, and has continued its efforts to produce and deploy biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons."

What Snowe sent the representative to say displays brazen mendacity, resulting in a negative reaction from the gathered citizens and something of a verbal melee.

May 7, 2003 and May 29, 2003
Post-invasion, the mobile bioweapons labs supposedly are found, and President Bush says so to Polish television on May 29. Later, it would be revealed in a Washington Post story that the Pentagon knew at the time that these were no such thing.

June 27, 2003
As the post-invasion period progressed, Powell and others would continued to use the bioweapons canard! On June 27 of 2003, Powell told NPR in an interview, "When I presented it to the UN on the 5th of February, all I could show was a cartoon picture of what we thought it looked like based on what people said to us. And guess what? We found something that looked just like that. And nobody has been able to come up with an alternative use for this."

August 10, 2003
What is still a seminal deconstruction of Powell's case is filed by Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley. Few papers carry it. It still is found HERE at the St. Petersburg Times.

"How does Powell's pivotal indictment look from the vantage point of today? Powell has said several times since February that he stands by it, the State Department said last week." But, as Hanley wrote, "Six months after Powell's Feb. 5 appearance, the file does look thin."

October 26, 2003
Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reports that Powell's aluminum tubes, supposedly to be used for bomb-grade uranium enrichment, a laughable proposition in the first place, were better suited for "drain pipe."

March 28, 2004
Los Angeles Times reporters Bob Drogin (see above) and Greg Miller reveal the codename "Curveball" to the public for the first time as the Iraqi defector who was the linchpin of Powell's case. In the past, Defense Intelligence had labeled him a "fabricator". Deep Blade Journal carried a major piece with extensive analysis on the story. Many of those links are still working, but use the one here to reach the original source.

July 10, 2004
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releases its "Phase I" report on Iraq WMD. It's a massive and very interesting document, and full of politics. Committee member Senator Olympia Snowe's tune now is that the missing WMD is explained by a "systemic failure throughout the intelligence community." She claims there was no political "pressure" on the analysts to give Powell a ginned-up case. But the "Phase II" report, that supposedly was to have dealt with the politics, never really materialized, and the White House "Silberman-Robb" report? Can you spell W-H-I-T-E-W-A-S-H?

April 25, 2005
The final report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the Bush Administration's hand-picked weapons inspectors, says, "Gone as far as feasible.... After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted." Nothing described in Powell's presentation ever was found.