The machinery of deceit is built of many cogs, and oops, one’s come loose!
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.
The CIA and Bush-Blair-era policymakers assert to this very day that they weren’t lying about Iraq’s WMD potential – they were simply ill-informed. They mistakenly used bad intelligence.
“Bad intelligence.” What is that? Is it intelligence which is misspelt? Is the date missing? Is it villanous intelligence, like what Gargamel had?
No, bad intelligence is a bunch of lies. It was never realistic to say that MI6 and the CIA are incompetent jobsworths who completely confused and misunderstood what they were hearing in Iraq. No, intelligence agencies were told lies by self-interested sources, and these lies resonated politically at the tops of ministries and around cabinet tables. Convenient lies, as opposed, I guess, to inconvenient truths.
As for Janabi’s reflections on the causation between his tall tales about Saddam’s biological weapons cache, and the 100,000 dead in Iraq today, he is a mite impenitent:
“I tell you something when I hear anybody – not just in Iraq but in any war – [is] killed, I am very sad. But give me another solution. Can you give me another solution? Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities.”
*cough * cough * Egypt! * cough!*
Filed under: International, Politics, Blair, Bush, Curveball, Iraq, Straw, war, WMD
Polygonic 