History will not be kind to American leaders who called for war with Iraq. More evidence of naive incompetance has come forward:

[CBS’ 60 Minutes] says Mr Alwan’s story unravelled once CIA agents finally confronted him with evidence contradicting his claims.

Back in November 2005, Col Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Mr Powell, told the BBC’s Carolyn Quinn he was aware the Germans had said that they had told the CIA of the unreliability.

“And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled?,” Col Wilkerson said.

A presidential intelligence commission into the matter found that Curveball [Mr Alwan] was a liar and an alcoholic.

Interesting that the Germans did not bite on false information, but the US fell for it at the highest levels.

Vagabond Scholar has a nice writeup of the tragic details.

Psychologists have long known that typically, human beings tend to look for evidence to support their views, not for evidence to contradict them. This dynamic makes the thorough vetting of critical intelligence all the more crucial.

[…]

The Bush administration must take a large share of the blame. Many people forget, as mentioned above, that Bush claimed weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found, and he repeated this claim several times. He later went on to deliberately substitute the argument that “Hussein had WMD” to “Hussein wanted WMD.”

[…]

No one doubted Hussein wanted WMD. The question was whether he had them, and whether he could actually get them.

Wonder where the name curveball came from.

According to an expert, Malcolm Nance:

Once at SERE and tasked to rewrite the Navy SERE program for the first time since the Vietnam War, we incorporated interrogation and torture techniques from the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia into the curriculum. In the process, I studied hundreds of classified written reports, dozens of personal memoirs of American captives from the French-Indian Wars and the American Revolution to the Argentinean ‘Dirty War’ and Bosnia. There were endless hours of videotaped debriefings from World War Two, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War POWs and interrogators. I devoured the hundreds of pages of debriefs and video reports including those of then Commander John McCain, Colonel Nick Rowe, Lt. Dieter Dengler and Admiral James Stockdale, the former Senior Ranking Officer of the Hanoi Hilton. All of them had been tortured by the Vietnamese, Pathet Lao or Cambodians. The minutiae of North Vietnamese torture techniques was discussed with our staff advisor and former Hanoi Hilton POW Doug Hegdahl as well as discussions with Admiral Stockdale himself. The waterboard was clearly one of the tools dictators and totalitarian regimes preferred.

Why does Dick Cheney suggest that waterboarding is not torture?

Nance does not mix words on the subject:

There is No Debate Except for Torture Apologists

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

End of discussion, or will Mukasey be confirmed?

The destabilization effort in Somalia led by the Ethiopians and backed by the US has left Somalia in shambles.

World Vision Somalia’s operations director Graham Davison who is based in Nairobi told the BBC’s Network Africa programme that the situation in Mogadishu, “has intensified”, and has “increased to a height that we haven’t seen in previous occasions”.

And about the newly displaced, Mr Davison said: “They’re suffering without food, sanitation, without water, without shelter. And the majority of these people are women and children.”

The outcome of destabilization are not unknown to the continent. South Africa was doing this to Mozambique and Angola for many years with similar effect.

Shells fell on Mogadishu on Saturday, Sunday and Monday as Ethiopian-Somali government troops and Islamist rebels battled.

And on Sunday, thousands were forced to flee from Ethiopian troops after they opened fire on protestors.

UNHCR says the level of militancy and intensity of the fighting has escalated as Ethiopian troops supporting the fragile Somali transitional government try to flush out insurgents.

All in the name of flushing “insurgents”. The real story is that Somalia was stabilizing as a Moslem country that opposed foreign intervention into domestic affairs. Naturally this sort of “alignment” threatened to block the long reach of the American counter-intelligence/anti-terror squads and so the US brought down the nascent government by sending in the Ethiopian army. Now, the US has better military “control” of the region again, but a half-million people or more are at risk of starvation.