Another BushCo Iraq War Lie — Mobile Bioweapons Labs Edition

It is completely amazing to me that the British press is still working to figure out how we got duped into the Iraq war. Part of this, of course, is that there have been multiple official inquiries that have been revealing the timelines, the decisions taken and the ways that the world was suckered into the Iraq war.

Today’s Guardian has extensive coverage of the crucial role of “Curveball” the Iraqi defector who spun out a tale for the CIA and German intelligence of a focused bioweapons program by Sadam Hussein — one that had already produced (in the words of Colin Powell at the UN):

We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels,” Powell said. “The source was an eyewitness — an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died.”

That quote and Curveball’s admission that he lied to get the US and the world to go to war are in a few articles over at the Guardian:

Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam

Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war

Curveball admissions vindicate suspicions of CIA’s former Europe chief

This is how clear Curveball’s admission of lying is:

Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy – one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell’s presentation revealed that the Bush administration’s hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot. Something else left him even more amazed; until that point he had not met a US official, let alone been interviewed by one.

“I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,” he told the Guardian in a series of interviews carried out in his native Arabic and German. “I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”

Read all of these articles when you have the chance. Not only was the US Government completely duped by this guy, they actively enabled this deception, then used it as one of the main rationales to go to war. Many of us certainly knew that the rationale for going to Iraq was incredibly weak. We knew after a time that some data and reasons had been manipulated to put the arguments in a more compelling light. It has been maddening to watch everything they said about this war turn out to be utterly false. Even more maddening is how disinterested all portions of government are in trying to understand how all of this expensive intelligence and decision-making could be so early led down the garden path or even how to figure out how to fix or prosecute those problems.