Why the CIA is to Blame From the beginning, the CIA made claims that the Saddam regime was working on its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program. CIA suspicions concerning Iraqi biological weapons program led to the making of many wrong assumptions based on Curveball’s unverified information. Drogin and Goetz report that because of this suspicion, CIA analysts regarded reports by the defector as “sophisticated and technically feasible” (2). All this was in spite of the fact that Curveball provided incomplete and unverifiable information. Whitelaw reveals that in October 2002, the American intelligence community issued a warning that Saddam had restarted Iraq’s chemical weapons program therefore necessitating a response by the policy makers (32). However, this claim by the CIA was not based on direct evidence but rather circumstantial evidence and logical deduction (Betts 602). The senior policy makers did not have any reasons to question the credibility of reports passed to them by CIA analysts. The CIA was responsible for coming up with the October 2002 “National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq” report. Barnes and Whitelaw assert that this report, which served as the foundation of the Bush administration’s case for war, was full of overstatements on Iraq’s chemical warfare ability or provided facts that were not supported by any underlying intelligence reporting (22). Since the Bush administration was in the habit of making decisions based on intelligence provided by the CIA, the report was taken at face value and used as justification for the Iraqi invasion. Because of the trust that senior policy makers had in the ability of the CIA, the Secretary of State in the Bush administration, Colin Powell, used testimony forwarded from Curveball by the CIA as authoritative information in a key speech to the UN. The policy makers who made a case for the Iraqi invasion did so under the impression that they had multiple reliable sources on the issue. However, the reality was that the only source providing information about Saddam’s alleged WMD program was the Iraqi defector, Curveball. Whitelaw states that because of the practice of the CIA to withhold critical details about their sources, policy makers were kept unaware of the fact that Curveball was the primary source used to support claims that the Saddam Regime had restarted its chemical weapons program (33). It is possible that if policy makers would not have made a case for war against Iraqi had they know that all their information was coming from one unreliable source. The CIA did not engage in a thorough verification of the information provided by the Iraq defector through his German handlers. The credibility of Mr. Janabi was already being called into question by the German intelligence agencies who were interviewing him. They expressed these concerns to the CIA but little action was taken. Drogin and Goetz note that in spite of Curveball providing vague information and making false claims about the role that he had played in the Saddam regime before defecting, the CIA was willing to take his word as the truth and act on it (4). The agency went on to make claims concerning Iraq’s chemical weapon program based on the testimonies of this defector. Whitelaw reports that this habit was not isolated since the CIA had frequently made