Haha. No shit.
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, aka “Curveball“, an Iraqi defector who falsified testimony about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, confirms that he made the whole thing up in an interview airing this week on the BBC2 TV series, “Modern Spies.” The former chemical engineer’s “confidence trick” was used by the Bush administration to justify going to war with Iraq in 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”.
For critics of the Iraq War, there were always 2 ways to look at the obvious fuck up: (a) the Administration was so inept + nervous about another historic attack that they overreacted to shady evidence, or (b) They used the worst modern attack on American soil to achieve a pre-ordained policy goal of regime change in Iraq.
As helplessly oblivious as Bush seemed at times, the cynics were always pretty confident (b) was the answer. I remember seeing this asshole “Curveball” on 60 minutes and thinking, “if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else.” Maybe “Knuckleball,” or “Spitter” or “The Situation.”
So yeah, that ‘told ya so’ is almost worth the 6-figure death totals.
Unreal. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics” … said as casually as Draper calling in Sal Romano for some Lucky Strike mock ups.