The incredibility of Curveball

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Curveball" -- the Iraqi exile who, through German's Federal Intelligence Service (BND), provided disinformation (i.e., lies) that served as one of the key planks in Bush's pre-Iraq War case against Saddam on alleged WMDs -- has finally spoken publicly (via TPM)..

Largely discredited and living in Germany, where he hardly lives like a king, Rafid Ahmed Alwan now claims that he is "not guilty," that "[e]verything that's been written about [him] isn't true."

Before the war, he was one of the U.S. intelligence community's top sources, or so it thought, on alleged Iraqi WMDs. He claimed that Iraq had mobile germ labs for biological warfare, and that falsehood ended up at the very center of the effort to sell the war. Most notably, it ended up in Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the U.N. in February 2003.

Michael Isikoff and David Corn delve into the Curveball scandal in great detail in their book Hubris. Basically, Curveball was fully discredited long before the war began. The BND never allowed the CIA or any other U.S. intelligence agency access to him. He was known to be a drunk. And it was widely suspected, both by German and (some) U.S. officials, both in the CIA and elsewhere, that his information was not credible.

Even now, he seems to be a liar:

"I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life," he said. "I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

How did the Bush administration get it so wrong?

"I'm not the source of these problems," he said.

Well, he said enough to the Germans and, through them, to the Americans to persuade them early on that Iraq had WMD capabilities. And he likely did so in order to secure a comfortable living in Germany: "For what I've done, I should be treated like a king."

But this does not excuse the BND, which knew he wasn't a reliable source, and it certainly doesn't excuse the CIA, or those at the CIA who were pushing false intelligence, or who didn't seem to know what was going on and/or neglected to look into it, or who were feeding the warmongers at the White House and the Pentagon what they most wanted, which was anything on alleged Iraqi WMDs, true or not, to feed both to the American people and to the rest of the world.

The Bush Administration didn't get it so wrong because of Curveball, however much of a liar he may have been, but because it didn't seem to matter to the warmongers from Bush on down whether they got it right or wrong at all. There were ample warnings questioning Curveball's credibility, as well as the credibility of other such sources, but the warmongers believed what they wanted to believe, so rooted were they in their own fanaticism, and didn't let anything like the truth get in the way.

Lies were used to sell the war. And it's been a war of lies ever since.