The infamous “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector and secret CIA source who concocted stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, expresses no remorse about his lies leading to a 9-year war that killed more than 100,000 people, including 4,486 U.S. soldiers.
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| (Photo by The Independent) |
In a new interview, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. According to The Independent, a London newspaper, it was a con job that changed the course of history, pulled off by an admitted thief who wanted to see Saddam Hussein toppled from power.
The chemical engineer claimed to have supervised the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. The German intelligence agency later warned the U.S. that Curveball’s reliability was questionable.
Yet, his lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an ultimately embarrassing speech making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003. With no solid confirmation, American intelligence officials turned Curveball’s phony drawings of a WMD lab into computer generated graphics for the UN speech.
Janabi first admitted his deliberate deception about one year ago. But his attitude toward those fabrications was never fully reported.
The Independent reports that Janabi, speaking in a new two-part series, “Modern Spies,” airing on BBC2 in England, says he has no regrets.
When it was put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”
From there, the BBC2 story turns to Bush administration officials who admit they “sexed up” Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Gen. Powell’s former chief of staff, conceded: “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.
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