[Ninong]

Remember Curveball? The guy who wanted to be allowed to stay in Germany so bad that he told the Germans all about Saddam's nonexistent mobile biological weapons labs and even the location of his nonexistent nuclear weapons facilities, which he said came to him in a dream.

Don't forget, we never interviewed Curveball. He was interviewed by German intelligence agents who passed the information on to the CIA with the caveat that they considered him delusional and incoherent and not a reliable source of information but they were sending it along anyway in case we wanted to follow up on anything. The Germans were shocked when Colin Powell used this information in his U.N. speech.


Curveball

ABC News has new information on Curveball.

Excerpts:

[Colin] Powell told ABC News he is "angry and disappointed" that he was never told the CIA had doubts about the reliability of the source.

"I spent four days at CIA headquarters, and they told me they had this nailed," Powell said.

[Imagine that! The Secretary of State is accusing the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency of misleading him. Isn't this the same guy who received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush for being a team player, unlike Colin Powell who was forced out for insisting on placing too much importance on fact-based intelligence and reality-based foreign policy. Faith-based intelligence is much more important than fact-based intelligence.]

Behind the scenes at the CIA, however, a former senior official says he was trying to keep the Curveball information out of the Powell speech.

"People died because of this," said Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of European operations at the CIA, who has written about it in a new book, "On the Brink." "All off this one little guy who all he wanted to do was stay in Germany."

Drumheller says he personally redacted all references to Curveball material in an advance draft of the Powell speech.

"We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller says. Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson was ever told of any doubts about Curveball.

"In fact, it was the exact opposite," Wilkerson told ABC News. "Never from anyone did we even hear the word 'Curveball,' let alone any expression of doubt in what Secretary Powell was presenting with regard to the biological labs," Wilkerson said.

[...]

The CIA has since issued an official "burn notice" formally retracting more than 100 intelligence reports based on his information.

P.S. -- Sort of related. It came out in sworn testimony during the Scooter Libby investigation and trial that George Tenet did in fact ask the White House to remove the 16 words about Saddam attempting to acquire uranium from Niger from Bush's State of the Union address but he was overruled by the White House. Tenet later accepted full responsibility for failing to catch it. That's not the way it happened. He did catch it but he was "overruled by the White House."

And Valerie Plame Wilson's book is finished and awaiting CIA clearance so that it can be published. There's only one small problem. The CIA is telling her that since she was a covert operative (NOC -- non-official cover), she didn't even exist as far as they're concerned prior to 2002. The CIA's position is that since she didn't even exist prior to 2002, she can't write about working for the CIA prior to 2002.