Curveball and the manufacture of a lie

The Guardian's revelation that "Curveball", the renowned source of intelligence on Iraq's WMD, made it all up is yet another nail in the coffin of those who claim that the intelligence was clear about the alleged threat. Curveball's evidence that Iraq was secretly rebuilding a substantial biological weapons capacity was a key part of US and British claims that Iraq presented a growing and imminent threat.

Now that the truth about this propaganda has been revealed, we can expect that those who constructed it – Tony Blair, Dick Cheney et al – will now amend their usual arguments to suggest that they were innocently misled by evidence such as Curveball's. After all, if a defector claimed that there was a substantial bio-weapons programme, as "Curveball" did, how could they know that he was lying? Again, we will be confronted with the "not my fault!" excuse from those who manufactured the case for an avoidable war.

David Kelly and I discussed very process – which he abhorred – a few weeks before he died. His revelation of it to a clumsy journalist, who called it "sexing up" (not a word that I think David would have used), was to trigger the events that led to his tragic death. Others of my former colleagues in the MOD and Foreign Office have freely admitted to me that this is precisely what took place. Yet, for all its subtlety and secrecy, we should name this process for what it was: the manufacture of a lie.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/15/curveball-wmd-carne-ross