(Dodgy Dossier) 45-minute WMD claim 'may have come from an Iraqi taxi driver'

[deminks]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/08/45-minutes-wmd-taxi-driver

An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.

Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist who is now a member of the Commons defence committee, made his comments in a report he has written claiming that MI6 always had reservations about some of the information in the dossier but that these reservations were brushed aside when Downing Street was preparing it for publication.

(END SNIP)

Astounding.

[FBaggins]

1. Everyone knows that the WMD were KEPT in taxis

Who would think to look there? Who would notice the smell?

Heck, they're probably still there. We should go get them.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. This is actually very old news. The nickname of this taxi driver was Curveball

and he was related to Chalabi.

Here is an article from 2005, although I believe this surfaced before then.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/20/12242/343

[deminks]

3. I don't think Curveball and this cabbie are the same.

The cabbie fed the British intelligence. Curveball evidently fed the Germans. Very similar results, though. We all went to war on faked information from unreliable sources.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

4. I heard that he was a cabbie from several sources. Here's one article

discussing him. The article is by George Will

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/11/11/Opinion/Cabbie_took_US_for_a_.shtml

Cabbie took U.S. for a ride

By GEORGE WILL, Washington Post Writers Group
Published November 11, 2007

snip
Margaret was right in that episode, recounted in the new book Curveball by Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times. Curveball was the code name of the Iraqi defector in Germany on whose reports the Bush administration relied heavily in its argument that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction justified a preventive war.

In 1999, Curveball defected to Germany, which has a significant portion of the Iraqi diaspora. Seeking the good life - a prestigious job, a Mercedes - he jumped to the head of the line of asylum-seekers and got the attention of Germany's intelligence agency with the word biowaffen, germ weapons. He claimed to have been deeply involved in Saddam's sophisticated and deadly science, particularly those notorious mobile labs. Notorious and, we now know, nonexistent.

German intelligence officials - partly because they thought Germany had been unfairly blamed for not detecting the Hamburg cell from which three of the four 9/11 pilots came - refused to allow U.S. officials to interview Curveball. Yet by March 2001, the Germans were expressing doubts about him; by April 2002, the British were too.

So were some U.S. officials. But others became invested in Curveball's credibility and soon they could not back down without risking personal mortification and institutional disgrace - both of which came, of course, after the invasion. <B>Then some of Curveball's Iraqi acquaintances were located and identified him as a "congenital liar" who was not a scientist but a taxi driver. </b>But before the invasion, he supplied an important rationale for launching it: He was the most important source for Colin Powell's 80-minute address to the U.N. Security Council detailing Iraq's WMD programs, the address that solidified American support for war.

[deminks]

5. So, either Curveball was the source for both the Powell fiasco and the dodgy dossier

or the coalition of the willing relied on the reports of two different cabbies. Curveball was reportedly a cabbie in Bagdad. The cabbie for the Blair's dossier worked "on the Iraqi/Jordanian border" and evidently was a cabbie straight up - did not profess to be anything else. That is why I think there were two different cabbies.

Astounding either way. The British press is all over this other cabbie today, which I had not heard of in connection with the Blair speech before. Which also makes me think this is two different cabbies.

Yes, we knew about Curveball and the Powell speech. I had not heard of Curveball and the Blair speech before.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

6. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised that another taxi driver was conjured up

to produce more evidence of WMD. The Intelligence between the US and the UK was incestuous and they shared that info with other countries. That's why other countries said they had Intel of WMDs being in Iraq. Meanwhile back in 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, who defected to the west, in a deposition declared that all chemical and biological WMDs were disposed of right after the Gulf War(he was in charge of WMDs) and that there really never was a Nuclear program in the works. When he decided to return to Iraq, Saddam had him executed. This deposition was available on the Internet prior to the IWR. :shrug:

BTW.... 60 Minutes did a show on Curveball in 2007. Have fun!
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3450752n