The Libby Draft
Another White House document demanded by the Senate intelligence panel but refused by Cheney, was the draft UN testimony for Secretary of State Colin Powell, written by Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and chief national security aide until his indictment on Oct. 28, 2005 in the Valerie Plame Wilson case.

According to numerous news accounts, two separate Libby drafts, totaling more than 90 pages, were tossed in the garbage by Powell, after he reviewed them with intelligence community analysts and senior officials, on the eve of his appearance at the UN Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003.

The Libby drafts contained allegations against Iraq that were not backed up by intelligence community data—including the allegations of Mohammed Atta's Iraqi intelligence ties. Where did Libby get the bogus information? The answer to that question, sources report, has Cheney sweating bullets. It may be the "smoking gun" that proves that Cheney was running his own rogue disinformation operation, to fake the case for war.

Much of the evidence of Cheney's conniving is fortunately available, because Secretary Powell had delegated his chief of staff, Colonel Wilkerson, to assemble and run the task force of intelligence community specialists, who would prepare the Feb. 5, 2003 UN Security Council testimony. In a series of news interviews, Wilkerson spelled out a chronology of skirmishes between his task force and the "Cabal."

On Jan. 25, 2003, Scooter Libby and John Hannah, Libby's deputy national security aide and a former vice president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), delivered a briefing on their proposed UN testimony at the White House situation room.

According to a Sept. 29, 2003 account of that session in the Washington Post, by Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler: "On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. 'We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, Wow! Here we go again,' said one official who helped draft the speech. 'You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again.'... Other officials present said they felt that Libby's presentation was over the top, that the wording was too aggressive and most of the material could not be used in a public forum. Much of it, in fact, unraveled when closely examined by intelligence analysts from other agencies and, in the end, was largely discarded. 'After one day of hearing screams about who put this together and what are the sources, we essentially threw it out,' one official present said."

Four days after the Jan. 25 situation room session, Libby and Hannah presented Powell with a 48-page draft text. Powell turned it over to Wilkerson and instructed him to take it to the CIA headquarters and scrub it for accuracy. Within 48 hours, the document had been shown to be based almost exclusively on sources the intelligence community had trashed as unreliable.

Libby came back with a second draft, this one 45 pages, containing much of the same material. Soon, this draft, too, was in the trash can, after careful scrutiny by Wilkerson and the team of CIA and DIA analysts assembled to vet the speech. "We fought tooth and nail with other members of the administration to scrub it and get the crap out," Wilkerson told Gentlemen's Quarterly on April 29, 2004.

In an interview with author James Bamford, Wilkerson added another tantalizing piece to the picture. Still describing Libby's efforts to shape the Powell testimony, the colonel complained, "It was all cartoon. The specious connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, much of which I subsequently found came from the INC and from their sources, defectors and so forth, [regarding the] training in Iraq for terrorists.... No question in my mind that some of the sources that we were using were probably Israeli intelligence. That was one thing that was rarely revealed to us—if it was a foreign source."

By the time that Secretary of State Powell had settled on a final draft for his UN testimony, sans much of the "bullshit," the Cheney Cabalists were beside themselves over their failure to convince the Secretary to go with the Atta-Saddam links. On the morning of Feb. 5, 2003, as Secretary Powell was resting in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, awaiting his UN Security Council appearance, a frantic Lewis Libby repeatedly phoned Colonel Wilkerson, to make one final pitch to get Powell to go with the "Saddam did 9/11" hoax. Wilkerson was already at the United Nations. In a Nov. 22, 2005 interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Wilkerson said, "I didn't take the call from the Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. I referred it to someone else." Nevertheless, Wilkerson did confirm that the purpose of the call was to press for inclusion of the bogus Saddam/al-Qaeda links.

Curveball
In his Security Council testimony, Powell cited what he claimed as hard evidence that Saddam had developed mobile biological weapons labs, which were producing weapons that posed a grave threat to the region. Powell has since called that testimony the low point of his long career.

The sole source on the mobile labs was an Iraqi informant codenamed "Curveball," who was controlled by the German intelligence service BND.

On Nov. 20, 2005, the Los Angeles Times published an exposé, based on interviews with five BND officials, revealing that the German government had warned repeatedly that "Curveball" was a fabricator and a drunk, his information highly suspect. Subsequently, German state radio and other German news outlets elaborated on the "Curveball" story, providing further details of repeated German intelligence warnings to the Americans that they increasingly viewed their source as thoroughly unreliable, and perhaps "crazy." The CIA later issued its own warnings that Curveball was yet another frontman for Chalabi's INC. As of 1996, the CIA had written off the INC as a collection of corrupt losers and fabricators.

The "Curveball" disinformation was another of Cheney's favorite fibs. Well after the Iraq invasion, and well after the CIA and the Defense Human Intelligence Service (Defense Humint) had concluded that "Curveball" was a liar, and that there was no evidence that Iraq had the so-called mobile bio-weapon labs, Dick Cheney appeared on National Public Radio and declared: "We know, for example, that prior to our going in, that he had spent time and effort acquiring mobile biological weapons labs, and we're quite confident he did, in fact, have such a program. We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were, in fact, part of that program. Now it's not clear at this stage whether or not he used any of that to produce, or whether he was simply getting ready for the next war. That, in my mind, is a serious danger in the hands of a man like Saddam Hussein, and I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

Cheney's love affair with "Curveball's" fabrications was, at least partly, explained by the fact that Doug Feith's spin machine alone had produced 75 intelligence reports, based exclusively on "Curveball's" debriefings, which were passed into the hand of U.S. intelligence through Defense Humint, and were accessed by Feith's cherry-pickers.

The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, otherwise known as the Silberman-Robb Commission, issued its final report to the President on March 31, 2005. The report contained a 31-page chapter dealing exclusively with "Curveball," detailing the battles that took place within the intelligence community over the vetting of that source. Ultimately, both CIA and Defense Humint concurred with the BND that "Curveball" was a liar. But the Silberman-Robb Commission catalogued a string of failures by the relevant intelligence services to communicate to policymakers that they had issued a "burn notice" on "Curveball" until after the disastrous Powell UN appearance and the start of the war.

Rendon Group's Info Warfare
After the CIA's mid-1990s dumping of Chalabi, the convicted bank swindler kept up his ties to such neo-con outposts as the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). When Bush-Cheney came into office in 2001, the Pentagon picked up the INC franchise, and gave a lucrative contract to a Beltway PR firm, The Rendon Group, to promote the overthrow of Saddam. The Rendon Group had literally created the INC back in 1992, on a secret CIA contract to begin covert operation to overthrow Saddam.

Under Bush-Cheney, the Rendon Group and INC ran a Pentagon-funded program, the Information Collection Program, through which Iraqi defectors were debriefed on Saddam regime crimes.

In December 2001, the INC promoted a defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to have worked at dozens of secret WMD sites in Iraq. A CIA polygraph exam exposed him as a liar. Yet, within weeks of submission of the CIA assessment, the New York Times' Judith Miller and Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Paul Moran were publishing "exclusive" stories based on interviews with al-Haideri. Cheney gave a series of speeches based on the Miller article.

On Sept. 8, 2002, as Cheney was gearing up the war drive, Miller wrote another "exclusive" INC-sourced story, claiming Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes that could only be used for centrifuges, a key component of a nuclear weapons program.

The State Department intelligence unit and the Department of Energy strenuously objected to the story. But based on Miller's article, and already-discredited reports that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa, Cheney et al. forced the war down the throat of Congress with images of "nuclear mushroom clouds."

This article is the first in a series of in-depth reports on Cheney's lies, being developed by an EIR task force which includes Michele Steinberg, George Canning, Mark Bender, Scott Thompson, Carl Osgood, and Judy DeMarco, all of whom contributed to this first part.

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