The Daily Background

There were several key claims made by the Bush Administration to justify the war in Iraq. There was the uranium yellowcake Niger nuclear claim (later exposed as fraud by Joe Wilson). There was the aluminum tubes claim (also found to be baseless). There was the WMD claim (again, entirely baseless).

One of the claims made as part of the WMD scare was that the German government had received info about a mobile weapons biolab that a supposed Iraq defector had provided information about. Code-named “Curveball,” he was the single source of intelligence for this claim. The Washington Post yesterday published a bombshell article on this Curveball:

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration’s case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell’s speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: “We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.”

[…]
More than a year after Powell’s speech, after an investigation that extended to three continents, the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

When the Germans gave the intelligence to the CIA, they said pointedly that they could not verify anything he said was true, but since they U.S. was looking for intelligence on this, they passed it along. This war was constructed around lies. Lies about yellowcake, lies about aluminum tubes, lies about anthrax munitions, and lies about mobil weapon biolabs. Full article.

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog