'Curveball' Turns Out To Be Two-Bit Con Man

The Los Angeles Times managed to track down and interview Rafid Ahmed Alwan, a.k.a. the infamous 'Curveball', purveyor of a remarkable series of stories on Iraq's supposed biological weapons capabilities. It was he that came up with the "mobile weapons labs" that Colin Powell showed cartoon drawings of at the United Nations, that Iraq was attempting to smuggle WMD's from England, and that a collection of corn sheds at Djerf al Nadaf were part of a secret biological weapons program. He now lives in Germany.

As it turns out, of course, he bullshitted the whole thing. In Iraq he was a con man, thief, embezzler and general crook who was fired from job after job.

Even his fellow Burger King employees in Germany knew him as a serial liar...

So his family, his friends, his co-workers and his employers, from Iraqi warehouses to German Burger Kings, all knew him to be a con man, crook and general nut. German officials warned the Americans not to use information provided by him, and weapons inspectors who investigated his claims before the war found them false.

But that still wasn't enough to keep his valued "information" out of the hands of the special intelligence gathering operations of Rumsfeld and Cheney, who then passed it to the press, or from Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations, or from George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, or from any of the myriad other administration reports used to justify the war. Truly, the Iraq War was a perfect example of a group of con men getting together and deciding to believe each other's stories.

Coalition deaths in the Iraq War have recently topped 4,100. The number of Iraqi deaths are not known, and not counted.

January 29, [...] the day after President George W. Bush's State of the Union address, which [...] included the claim that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons plants, State Department [and] CIA officers [...] were simultaneously in an uproar over the CURVEBALL material. In answer to queries from CIA manager Margaret Henoch, the German intelligence service, which had Alwan in their charge, refused to certify the CURVEBALL data and denied CIA access to the original transcripts recording the conversations. Thus, the agency never had direct contact with CURVEBALL, who in fact had only been seen once by an American, an official of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who had harbored doubts about the man. The CIA was working strictly from DIA translations of German texts. Henoch feared using third-hand information that contained transliteration problems. Her suspicions were further aroused after it became clear the German service itself doubted CURVEBALL's reliability.

coyotemike said:
I caught a bit of a certain right wing asshole's radio show the other day (oddly, not Limbaugh. It was some woman whose name I forget for the moment). The latest tactic is to say that Bush is not at fault because he was given faulty information.

Nothing like passing the buck, eh? This is what we get when we elect an administration without the slightest skill in critical thought.

poeticdesires said:

What that woman said is akin to a manager saying, "Oh, it's not my fault. My employee gave me false information. I shouldn't be held responsible."
If President Bush were the manager of a McDonalds', he would have been fired long ago. As is, he holds the most powerful position in our government, and the world, seemingly without any real consequences to his actions.

motorfirebox said:
'harbored doubts' about him? he worked at Burger King. now, there's nothing wrong with working at Burger King; i did so myself, during college. but i'm pretty sure that nobody mistook me for a fucking source of international intelligence while i was slinging whoppers and Hershey pies to the fat fuckers who came into the store. what the shit, man?

PaulNikon said:
I have a job for him. Grave digger at Arlington.