Redstate

Because somebody has to take the fall.

By Moe Lane Posted in War — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Let's start by getting our lurkers in the right mindset:

While I personally don't see the point in walking around all day thinking about politics in such terms, it can't be denied that the state seems to have its attraction. Everything is so simple when you can blame it all on omnipotent, nigh-supernatural forces, nu?

Faulty Intel Source "Curve Ball" Revealed
60 Minutes: Iraqi's Fabricated Story Of Biological Weapons Aided U.S. Arguments For Invasion

(CBS) 60 Minutes has identified the man whose fabricated story of Iraqi biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq. It has also obtained video of "Curve Ball," as he was known in intelligence circles, and discovered he was not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be.

...

Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons.

...

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

(H/T: The Anchoress, who is, by the way, also up for this Weblog Award thing that has everybody else excited)

Why is this bad for George Tenet? Read on.

Ever watch a professional stage magician? Ever play at being one yourself? I fiddled around with it a little as a kid. Don't remember how to do a single trick, but I still remember a key piece of advice for those trying to work out how an illusion was done: watch the hands. The voice is there to distract you, the eyes are there to keep your attention. Watch the hands.

The Anchoress wrote in her commentary:

Almost for as long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been asking Where did the WMD intel come from?, a good question that everyone ignored in the rush to chant, “Bush lied!” As I pointed out repeatedly, President Bush presented the nation and the UN with the same intelligence President Clinton used to justify the Iraqi Liberation Act, and our flyovers and occasional bombings in that country - intelligence that pre-dated the Bush administration. Hillary Clinton, in 2003, concurred, saying that the information President Bush was showing was “consistent with what we saw,” when she and her husband were in the White House.

Watch the hands. The CBS article - and, I presume, the 60 Minutes segment - was not intended to be an exoneration of the Bush administration; the language throughout suggests otherwise. But it does come across as being an exoneration of the Clinton administration, and in a method classic to Washington: by picking someone else to blame. From CBS

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons [see what I mean about the language being otherwise? - ed.]- for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Tenet claims otherwise, of course. CBS gets quotes contradicting him from former CIA types Tyler Drumheller - Captain Ed has some background on this guy, and notice how the 'sphere knew about all of this months before CBS deigned to tell us? - and Margaret Henoch, who no-doubt coincidentally contributed two grand to a group that no-doubt coincidentally endorsed Hillary Clinton for President in January of this year. If the Democrats win in 2008, it will be interesting to see if those names crop up again... but I digress. The point is that there's a case to be made that a narrative's being set up, and if so, it'll be one that will pass the blame off to a designated scapegoat.

Why this is important to the GOP and the Right is probably not immediately obvious: we didn't ask to be shoehorned into Democratic narratives and besides, they aren't really shoehorning us, just our caricatures. What makes this of interest is that it suggests, however mildly, that the official Beltway narrative is shifting away from "assumed and inevitable failure" to "victory, at tragic cost." Because while it makes no sense for Senator Clinton to voluntarily take ownership of a lost war, associating herself with one that has been won despite the Republicans (you saw that "framing" here first, kids!) is another story. One that the Democrats may be starting to think that they'd rather be hearing.

Well, some Democrats, anyway.