Iraq's WMD Curveball comes back around; identity revealed

Bush-Cheney et al didn't believe "Curveball", they just used him to support their phony WMD EXCUSE FOR INVADING Iraq. ---BBB

June 18, 2008
Iraq's WMD Curveball comes back around
by Warren Strobel - McClatchy blog

We here at McClatchy like to think we've broken a lot of ground when it comes to the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence and policy mistakes in the war in Iraq.

But our colleagues over at the Los Angeles Times have done some amazing work over the years in ferreting out the story of the aptly-named Curveball, the Iraqi defector whose extravagant claims--including that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons labs--the Bush administration used to make the case for war. Curveball's "intelligence" appeared in Bush's speeches and Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

Now, two reporters for the Times, John Goetz and Bob Drogin have tracked down Curveball, whose real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, in Germany, where he sought asylum in 1999 and soon began spinning fanciful tales about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

Alwan told the Times he has been maligned. "I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life," he's quoted as saying.

But the paper found that there were plenty of reasons to suspect Alwan was throwing a Curveball from the get-go:

He never told his handlers from the BND, the German intelligence service, that he had been fired twice for dishonesty and fled Iraq to avoid arrest.

Hilal Freah, who had been his supervisor at a warehouse complex near Baghdad, told the Times: "Rafid told five or 10 stories every day. ... I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was lying."

In early 2002, before the Iraq war, Alwan was working at Burger King in Germany:

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could America believe such a person?"

How, indeed?