Admin Lied, People Died

Sojourners editor-in-chief and self-styled “prophet” Jim Wallis unloaded on some of his favorite people in his column at Beliefnet last week. In the process, he neatly demonstrates why editors need editors:

[60 Minutes last night] revealed the results of a two-year investigation into the source of the key piece of information which was used by the Bush administration as “proof” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This was the information that Colin Powell used in his now famous February 5, 2003 testimony at the United Nations reporting an “eyewitness” account that Saddam had a “mobile bio/chemical weapons program.” The source, ironically code-named “Curve Ball,” was a young Iraqi defector in Germany, who claimed he was a top student employed by a so-called seed purification plant that was really a bio/chemical weapons facility, and that he saw trucks moving in and out to be armed with the weapons of mass destruction. Problem is that he wasn’t, after all, a “top student,” wasn’t there during the time he reported, got caught stealing equipment from his next employer, and there turned out to be walls at the alleged entrances and exits where the trucks were supposed to be going in and out.

So far, so good. It’s undoubtedly true that “Curveball” turned out to be more of a spitball, an Iraqi who wanted the German equivalent  of a green card, and so made up a story about an Iraqi bio/chem weapons plant that German intelligence handed on to the CIA without confirmation. Of course, “Curveball” was not the only source of information about Iraqi WMDs, as anyone who’s been paying attention for the last several years know. (Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center makes quick work of Wallis’ ignorance in a piece at NRO.) But it is true that “Curveball” and his story were taken more seriously than they should have been by the American intelligence community. Anyway, Wallis goes on:

Powell apparently believed the CIA’s information, as secretaries of state normally do, when he told the world that Saddam had a mobile bio/chemical weapons program at the same time his successor, Condoleezza Rice, was talking about “mushroom clouds.”

So at this point it is pretty clear that the CIA fed information that turned out to be incorrect to Colin Powell, information that formed the basis for his UN speech. Powell believed them, “as secretaries of state normally do,” and so is apparently exonerated from any further calumny on Wallis’ part. And rightly so–Powell was operating in good faith on what looked like, from the CIA’s standpoint, solid information (which, remember, included a lot more than just one Iraqi defector’s unconfirmed testimony). Powell, of course, wasn’t the only one to use that information–it was also cited by a wide variety of members of Congress, including Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, John Kerry, John Edwards, and others during the debate in October of 2002 over the bill that authorized the president’s use of force in Iraq. They are all given a pass by Wallis, but not everyone is:

I believe that Dick Cheney is a liar; that Donald Rumsfeld is also a liar; and that George W. Bush was, and is, clueless about how to be the president of the United States….Almost 4,000 young Americans are dead because of the lies of this administration, tens of thousands more wounded and maimed for life, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also dead, and 400 billion dollars wasted—because of their lies, incompetence, and corruption.

So Powell didn’t lie in his speech to the UNSC, but Cheney did. Kerry didn’t lie in his speeches to the Senate, but Rumsfeld did. Clinton’s not a liar, an incompetent, or corrupt, but Bush is. All of them were operating with the same information, but only some are evil–the rest were just, uh, misquoted. But think about it for longer than Wallis does–say, five or ten seconds–and the patent absurdity of this becomes clear. For Wallis’ screed to be anything other than partisan hysteria, Bushco (meaning a pretty small coterie of people who managed to keep a secret the blowing of which would have rivaled Watergate for its impact) would have to have known there were no WMDs and didn’t tell Powell or anyone in Congress, and decided to go in anyway, knowing that it would eventually become clear that they had lied, at which point support for the war would likely collapse. Where this super-secret information would have come from is anyone’s guess, since every major intelligence agency in the world, including those of nations that opposed the invasion, agreed with the conclusion that Iraq had, at the very least, chemical and probably biological weapons. If, in fact, the White House and its cronies were operating with the same information as the rest of the government–and no one has ever come up with any evidence to show otherwise–then they may have been guilty of bad judgment, or of given the CIA too much credence, or of faulty assumptions. But that doesn’t make them liars who, he says, “should spend the rest of their lives in prison,” except in the far-left fever swamps that Prophet Jim Wallis is apparently hanging around in these days.