Does anyone know more about Curveball?

[JonLP24]

CNN claimed to have found the "source" that said Saddam had a WMD plant near Baghdad. CNN had an interview of the guy, he didn't say much but did say he never claimed Saddam had WMD.

I found this about him
Curveball was the pseudonym given by the Central Intelligence Agency to Rafid Ahmed Alwan (Arabic: رافد أحمد علوان‎), an Iraqi citizen who defected from Iraq in 1999, claiming that he had worked as a chemical engineer at a plant that manufactured mobile biological weapon laboratories as part of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program.<1> Alwan's allegations were subsequently shown to be false by the Iraq Survey Group's final report published in 2004.<2><3> Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service regarding the authenticity of the claims, the US Government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.<4><1> On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity.<5> Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth."<1>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

[Lone_Star_Dem]

1. This is an older article, but still well worth reading.

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'

November 20, 2005
BERLIN -- The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.

Much, much more at link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball20nov20,0,1753730.story?page=1&coll=la-home-headlines

[lligrd]

2. I Watched The CNN Special

and thought it was obvious that the guy was lying during the interview. How the heck anyone could have ever believed a word he said is beyond me.