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A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq. The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence — which the administration chose to ignore

Tyler S. Drumheller, a high-level CIA officer who publicly battled agency leaders over one of the most outlandish claims in the U.S. case for war with Iraq, died Aug. 2 at a hospital in Fairfax County. He was 63. The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Linda Drumheller. Mr. Drumheller held posts in Africa and Europe over a 26-year career during which the CIA’s focus shifted from the Cold War to terrorist threats. He rose to prominent positions at CIA headquarters, serving as chief of the European division at a time when the agency was abducting al-Qaeda...

Updated March 27 to include responses from the FBI and the State Department. Emails disclosed by a hacker show a close family friend was funneling intelligence about the crisis in Libya directly to the Secretary of State’s private account starting before the Benghazi attack. Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account. The emails, which were posted on the internet...

Throwing Darwin a Curve by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. * “The pitch cuts the inside corner of the plate for strike two.” That familiar sound is heard on radios around the world. In fact, some of the best pitchers in America are not Americans. Great pitching ability is not limited to ethnicity or geography, but rather to human beings alone. Great pitchers make it look so easy, and “practice makes perfect,” but it helps that the brain power necessary for control, neurological connections, and muscular arrangements for the human arm are exceedingly better than any system that exists on...

Sexy Russian Spy Anna Chapman Arrested Because She Was Getting Too Close To Someone Inside "Obama's Inner Circle"? That's what a former FBI counterintelligence officer reveals. The Independent (UK) highlights the six hundredth revelation that Iraqi informant "Curveball" lied. They bury the actual new news -- that the FBI felt it had to move quickly to arrest and deport Anna Chapman, for fear that someone close to Obama was about to snork her, and get caught in a "honey trap" (sex, followed by extortion for secrets/influence). That someone "close" to Obama? A "sitting cabinet official," this FBI counterintelligence officer says....

LONDON – An Iraqi man whose testimony the United States used as a key evidence to build a case for war in Iraq says he is proud that he lied about his country developing mobile biological warfare labs. The Guardian newspaper published an interview Wednesday with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who has been identified as the informer called "Curveball," whose claims about weapon labs formed part of then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council in 2003, shortly before the war began. The Guardian quoted al-Janabi as saying: "I had the chance to fabricate something to...

Breaking curveball too good to be true Curveballs curve and fastballs go really fast, but new research suggests that no pitcher can make a curveball “break” or a fastball “rise.”

How German Intelligence Helped Justify the US Invasion of Iraq Five years ago, the US government presented what it said was proof that Iraq harbored biological weapons. The information came from a source developed by German intelligence -- and it turned out to be disastrously wrong. But to this day, Germany denies any responsibility......(Der Spiegel)   German Intelligence Was 'Dishonest, Unprofessional and Irresponsible' - Interview with David Kay (Der Spiegel)   'The Germans Share in the Responsibility'- Interview with Lawrence Wilkerson (Der Spiegel)

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH IRAQ WMD SLEUTH DAVID KAYDavid Kay was charged by the Bush administration with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invasion. Instead of finding weapons, though, he found what he told SPIEGEL was 'the biggest intelligence fiasco of my lifetime.' SPIEGEL: As head of the Iraq Survey Group, you led the effort to follow up on the claims made by 'Curveball,' the asylum seeker from Iraq who told German intelligence that Saddam Hussein was building mobile biological weapons laboratories. Do you remember the first time you began to doubt his story? Kay: The real shock...

60 Minutes throws another curve ball at the U.S. commander in chief. When Colin Powell outlined America’s case for invading Iraq before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, he relied on an eyewitness account from an Iraqi chemical engineer who knew about Iraq’s mobile production program—a wmd factory on wheels, so to speak. On Nov. 4, 2007, cbs’s 60 Minutes exposed Powell’s source, code-named “Curve Ball,” as a fraud. “Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction?” correspondent Bob Simon asked at the top of the program. “No, he did not. We’ve known that for some time now....

60 Minutes outed "Curve Ball" last week, and blatantly lied about Saddam's WMDs. If you still think that Saddam didn't have any WMDs or WMD weapons programs ... you must read this post. I've also included a picture of a sarin chemical warhead found in al Asad, Iraq.

Iraq war source's name revealed The US cited Mr Alwan's bio-weapon claims in its war argument A US TV network has revealed the name of "Curveball" - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government's argument to invade Iraq.The CBS show 60 Minutes identifies him as Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan. The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was. His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were backed until well after the 2003...

The identity of the man who claimed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, a key piece of information that helped lead the U.S. charge to invade Iraq, has been outed by CBS' "60 Minutes" news show. Rafid Ahmed Alwan, known as "Curve Ball" in intelligence circles, is not a chemical engineering expert, according to the report, which instead characterized Alwan as a liar, a thief and poor student. The CIA received hundreds of summaries of debriefings with Alwan, contributing to other intelligence reports that led the United States to bomb and invade Iraq. Former CIA Director George Tenet...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate panel has begun an inquiry to determine what a top official in Saddam Hussein's government told the CIA about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in late 2002 as the Bush administration made its case for war. ADVERTISEMENT The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said in a September 8 report that it launched the investigation after the CIA's former chief of European clandestine operations appeared on the CBS' "60 Minutes" news magazine in April. The official, Tyler Drumheller, told CBS that the Iraqi government source had said Iraq had no active unconventional weapons program. Drumheller's...

The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report. Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.

WASHINGTON — In a "60 Minutes" interview on April 23, Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA's Europe division, made a sensational charge. He claimed that President Bush and his White House ignored intelligence before the invasion of Iraq indicating that Saddam Hussein had no had weapons of mass destruction. On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source...

ABC News Iraq WMD red flags ignored, ex-CIA aide tells paper Reuters June 25, 2006 WASHINGTON - A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector's claims about the country's mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable...

Germans Say U.S. Used Bad Data to Justify Iraq Invasion Sat Nov 19 2005 17:58:49 ET 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 Iraq war. The LOS ANGELES TIMES is planning to front the allegation is Sunday editions, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT. Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with the LOS ANGELES TIMES that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the...

.... GERECHT: We actually know from inspectors that, in fact, there were large quantities of WMD that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, built. Now, what happened was that there appears to have been some change in the tactic and approach by Saddam Hussein during the 1990s. I suggest to you, the only way you really would have been able to detect that would have been multiple sources, multiple volunteers inside of those organizations that could have verified it, and that would have been very, very difficult, and the agency didn't have that type of penetration before. BLITZER: Melissa, you worked...

April 3, 2005 Day of the Serial Fabricator (See original for reference links) Edward Jay Epstein In a scathing ad hominem attack on the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities in the New York Times today, Maureen Dowd protests: "It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon." She then implores, "Please, no more pantomime investigations." Despite such ridicule from Dowd, the nine-person bipartisan Commission is not without credentials and...