The lie the Neo-cons needed, got and ran with
To
start a war
msnbc.com
2/15/2011
LONDON — An Iraqi defector who went by
the codename “Curveball” has publicly admitted for the first time that he made
up stories about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret factories to try to bring
down Saddam Hussein’s regime.
"I had a problem with the Saddam
regime," Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who fled Iraq in 1995, told The
Guardian newspaper. "I wanted to get rid of him and now I had
this chance."
Al-Janabi’s information was used in part by
the U.S. as justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. More than
100,000 people, most of them Iraqi civilians, have died in the war. The U.S.
began to withdraw its troops from Iraq last summer.
Janabi
said he was comfortable with what he did, despite the war that ensued.
"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not
right," he told the Guardian. "They gave me this chance. I had the
chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of
that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of
democracy."
Al-Janabi’s admission that he lied comes a
little over a week after the eighth anniversary of then-U.S. Secretary of State
Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which he laid out the case for
the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction
At one point, Powell presented slides
alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost
impossible to find.
The Guardian said it recently interviewed
Al-Janabi in a series of meetings in Germany, where he has been granted asylum.
The Iraqi engineer said the BND, the German secret service, approached him in
March 2000 looking for inside information about Saddam's Iraq.
He said he had told a German official about
the existence of mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000.
The BND traveled to a Gulf city, believed to
be Dubai, to speak with his former boss at the Military Industries Commission
in Iraq, Dr. Bassil Latif.
Latif strongly denied al-Janabi's claim of
mobile bioweapons trucks and another allegation that 12 people had died during
an accident at a secret bioweapons facility in Baghdad, according to the
Guardian.
German officials confronted al-Janabi with
his boss’s denial and did not contact him again until the end of May 2002,
al-Janabi told the Guardian. Despite his earlier disputed statements, al-Janabi
said, Gerrman and U.S. authorities continued to take him seriously.
He said he was not asked again about the
bioweapons trucks until a month before Powell's speech.
"I tell you something when I hear
anybody — not just in Iraq but in any war — [is] killed, I am very sad. But
give me another solution. Can you give me another solution?" he told the
Guardian.
"Believe me, there was no other way to
bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities."
Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA
in Europe, said Curveball's admission made him feel better about himself.
Drumheller, who says he warned his superiors
at the CIA before the 2003 invasion that Curveball might be a liar, said the
confession would be a final wake-up call for those who continue to insist there
had been weapons of mass destruction.
"The interesting part for me is that he
has recanted what he said, which is fascinating in the sense that I think there
are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that.
Even now," Drumheller told the Guardian.
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