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Showing Original Post only (View all)"CURVEBALL" .."Man whose WMD Lies Led to 100,000 Deaths Confesses All" [View all]
Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses allDefector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion
Jonathan Owen
Sunday, 1 April 2012
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.
But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."
US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".
As for his former boss: "I don't see any way on this earth that Secretary Powell doesn't feel almost a rage about Curveball and the way he was used in regards to that intelligence."
More at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/man-whose-wmd-lies-led-to-100000-deaths-confesses-all-7606236.html
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''We are heroes in error.'' -- Ahmed Chalabi, interim oil minister of NewIraq 4.3.
Octafish
Apr 2012
#41
Given the slight interest in this on this Democratic site...I wouldn't hold my breath....
KoKo
Apr 2012
#28
That is my express rationale for continuing to bring these inconvenient truths up for discussion.
Octafish
Apr 2012
#42
That was a "joke" he did at one of the DC dinners--correspondents, or one similar.
MADem
Apr 2012
#22
Actually, Powell was said to have called the script he was given "bullshit",
Art_from_Ark
Apr 2012
#33
Bullshit! He was nothing but a fig leaf for Cheney/Bush to cover their own lies.
Uncle Joe
Apr 2012
#21
Curveball could lie and lie all he wanted to. The Bush administration believed him and improved him.
Bolo Boffin
Apr 2012
#23
Curveball didn't talk to the Project for a New American Century. He talked to governments.
Bolo Boffin
Apr 2012
#31
I remember when I actually thought common sense would step in & the checks & balances
pacalo
Apr 2012
#35
That's been the way our country has been run for a long time. Look at the Viet Nam War.
Selatius
Apr 2012
#38
Probably far more than 100K deaths. Plus maiming, destruction of families, loss of cultural
wiggs
Apr 2012
#46
He was drunk out of his mind and we only used the translation from the German interrogations
underpants
Apr 2012
#50