Defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi has admitted he lied when he told European intelligence agents in 2000 that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Janabi’s lie proved monumental as the false information was used by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq three years later, even though no American official bothered to personally interview him before committing to war.

 

In an interview with The Guardian, Janabi said he told German intelligence about the existence of mobile bioweapons trucks and hidden factories in the hopes it would bring down the regime of Saddam Hussein. But he was surprised when the U.S. so thoroughly bought his phony tale without ever seeking first-hand testimony from him, and instead relied on what German and British intelligence had gathered.

 

Janabi, codenamed Curveball by Western spies, was exposed as a liar as early as mid-2000, when German and British agents tried unsuccessfully to corroborate some of his story with his Iraqi boss, Dr. Basill Latif, who also had left the country. However, this development did not result in the Germans discrediting his claims, which opened the way for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to make the administration’s case before the United Nations on February 5, 2003, that Hussein was a threat who had to go.

 

To support his argument, Powell claimed that Janabi “supervised one of these facilities,” adding that Janabi, “actually was present during biological agent production runs and was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died” None of this was true. Powell’s presentation included a computer-generated image of the non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratory.

 

Janabi had claimed that Saddam Hussein was operating a bioweapons program in Djerf al-Nadaf in south-east Baghdad. In fact, the alleged weapons center was a birdseed purification plant.

-Noel Brinkerhoff, David Wallechinsky

 

Defector Admits to WMD Lies That Triggered Iraq War (by Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, The Guardian)

Curveball: How US Was Duped by Iraqi Fantasist Looking to Topple Saddam (by Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, The Guardian)