Bush Admin's Secret Iraq Intel Source "Curveball" Revealed

[marmar]

from AlterNet's PEEK:



Bush Admin's Secret Iraq Intel Source "Curveball" Revealed

Posted by Phoenix Woman, Firedoglake at 4:53 AM on April 1, 2008.

The German government's got him hidden away, and for good reason: I can imagine a number of people who would want him dead.




Lost in last week's hubbub was the news that "Curveball" -- the mysterious Iraqi engineer whose bogus claims on Saddam's weapons capabilities were used by Team Bush to justify invading Iraq -- has been outed:

An Iraqi engineer who provided the information that became one of the key planks in the Bush administration's case justifying the invasion of Iraq has been tracked down by undercover reporters to a drab residential block in southern Germany.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named Curveball (a baseball term for deception), has been in hiding since the invasion five years ago, and lives under an assumed name.

The German government's got him hidden away, and for good reason: I can imagine a number of people who would want him dead.

But get this:

Although German intelligence officials had warned the CIA that Curveball's claims were unreliable, and UN inspectors had failed to corroborate them, the Bush administration promoted the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion.

Now Curveball denies having made the claims in the first place. The BBC 2 programme Newsnight broadcast last night secretly filmed footage of the discredited agent who was approached by Der Spiegel magazine in his German hideout where he declined to give a formal interview. His face was blanked out in the footage in which a reporter asked him on his doorstep whether he had ever spoken about Iraq's biological weapons. Curveball replied "No."

I wonder why this news didn't lead all the evening news broadcasts or make the front pages of our papers. Instead, our media was either freaking out about Jeremiah Wright or about whether Hillary faced sniper fire in Tuzla ten years ago.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80910/

[bryant69]

1. Who would want him dead?

I mean the Bush Administration is surely happy with how things turned out - I suppose the Iraqi people?

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[marmar]

3. But if he's now denying that he ever made the claim in the first place.....

.... there are lots of people in Langley, Va. who'd want to "shut him up."

[bryant69]

5. Why? Because he might embarass the CIA?

Hasn't the invasion of Iraq been embarrassment enough? I mean would killing him really fix that problem.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[marmar]

6. But if he's saying he never made the claims - claims BushCo based the war on to begin with....

.... then the Bush administration can't even claim they were misled by Curveball's faulty info. It would be irrefutably an outright lie, and even our timid Congress couldn't ignore that....So I hope.

[stellanoir]

2. Who the heck would believe a guy who's alias is "Curveball" in the first place ?

[pinto]

4. Someone, somewhere, sometime will piece together the whole 'Curveball' story -

it'll make one heck of a read.

[magellan]

7. I hope they're keeping him on ice for a future war crimes tribunal

Unlikely as that may be, it's sure as hell that our own government isn't interested in accountability.