White House Used 'Gossip' to Build Case for War
"President Bush referred to Curveball's tale in his January 2003 State of the Union address, and the alleged mobile labs were a central claim in the now notorious presentation to the United Nations by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, in February 2003, making the case for war.
The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Mr Powell overstate Curveball's case. 'We were shocked,' he said. 'We had always told them it was not proven ... It was not hard intelligence.'
The Iraqi, it now is clear, told his story to bolster his quest for a German residence visa. According to BND officials, he was psychologically unstable.
The debacle became complete when American investigators, sent after the invasion to find evidence of the WMDs, instead discovered Curveball's personnel file in Baghdad. It showed he had been a low-level trainee engineer, not a project chief or site manager, as the CIA had insisted. Moreover he had been dismissed in 1995 - just when he claimed to have begun work on bio-warfare trucks.
Curveball was also apparently jailed for a sex crime and then drove a Baghdad taxi."
- posted by geoff @ #