CURVEBALL: Info Untrue, Never Confirmed, Never Verified-CIA Never Even Met Him (BuzzFlash)

The Con Men and the Con Man: How the Bush Admininstration Threw Us a "Curveball" on Iraq -- A BuzzFlash Interview
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 11/27/2007
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

-- Bob Drogin, LA Times reporter and author,
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War


BuzzFlash: First of all, who is Curveball?

Bob Drogin: Curveball is an engineer who came out from Iraq in 1999 and went to Germany. He became the chief source of some of the most important intelligence that led to the war in Iraq. That's the simple version of it.


BuzzFlash: Or misintelligence.


Bob Drogin: Yes, as it turned out, he was a con man. The information that he gave was, for the most part, untrue. It was never confirmed. It was never verified. He was never vetted. The Americans never interviewed him. They didn't even know his name. The information was simply passed to them by the Germans.

Nonetheless, the information formed the chief element, the key points, when Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council before the war. It became information that the President used in his 2003 State of the Union speech before the war. The President announced that Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities, and Curveball was the reason why. And yet the entire case was built on a tissue of lies that were subsequently amplified by others -- twisted. The CIA had never met him. They'd never interviewed him, and yet they took his information to the White House because that's what the White House wanted to hear. And they never made the effort to confirm it.


BuzzFlash: He was a con man who offered tales that were useful to the White House that wanted to go to war.


Bob Drogin: Essentially. After 9/11, the criticism was that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had failed to connect the dots. In Curveball, the difference is they made up the dots. In my way of thinking, it's a much more significant failure of intelligence, because never before in our history have we sacrificed so much blood and treasure and national credibility on chasing an utter delusion. And he was one of the leading causes of that.

way more at:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/085

I call it treason to lie the nation into a phony war when the only purpose of that war is to increase republicon crony oil & munitions profits.

TREASON against the United States of America.