Man Whose WMD Lies Led to 100,000 Deaths Confesses All
Without Curveball’s lies the motives to attack Iraq would have been a lot less convincing. Between Curveball’s and Sadaam’s posturing regarding the existence of Iraqi WMD, it became a question of could the US take the chance that they were lying, especially after 9/11? You also have to wonder which of Sadaam’s advisors or allies supported him on the insane notion that it was best to continue the posturing regarding WMD.
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq - starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds - will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.
He tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”
The chemical engineer claimed to have overseen the building of a mobile biological laboratory when he sought political asylum in Germany in 1999. His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003.
But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, he simply replies: “Yes.”
US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” he says, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy”.
