WMD "Curveball" Comes Clean

Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all

Defector tells how US officials 'sexed up' his fictions to make the case for 2003 invasion

01 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. read more>>>

‘Curveball,’ man who lied about WMDs, comes clean

04/03/2012 - “Curveball,” the man whose lies about weapons of mass destruction helped form the basis for invading Iraq, has come clean in an interview with the BBC, as reported by British news site the Independent.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, whose CIA cryptonym is Curveball, is an Iraqi chemical engineer who defected from Iraq in 1999 and subsequently invented claims about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

On the BBC interview Modern Spies, when Janabi is told “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie,” he responds, only: “Yes.”

The story of Curveball and his fictitious reports have been narrated in newspaper articles and books, but until now, Janabi had not publicly come clean.

“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,” Janabi told the BBC.

The defector made his claims about WMDs seem legitimate by telling U.S. officials that he supervised the building of a mobile biological laboratory. He had not. read more>>>