Those Damn Liberal Media Meat Puppets Start Piling ON!!!

The Iraqi defector whose claims regarding Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities were central to the US government's case for the 2003 invasion, despite repeated warnings that they were dubious, has been unmasked by a television documentary.

The informer, codenamed Curveball was Rafid Ahmed Alwan who, in 1999, turned up at a refugee centre in Germany seeking political asylum. He went on to convince the Pentagon he was a brilliant chemist who had helped develop mobile biological warfare laboratories.

His role in the build-up to war was exposed in a detailed investigation by the Los Angeles Times, in which he was dismissed as an "out-and-out" fabricator who should have aroused scepticism in the CIA. The LA Times said Curveball was the brother of a senior aide to Ahmed Chalabi, then leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and reported that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA knew exactly who he was.

But he is named for the first time in an edition of the US network CBS's documentary 60 Minutes to be broadcast tomorrow. The report is already on the programme's web pages. The documentary assumes he is still living in Germany, under a false name.
...
Curveball's claims were discredited in 2002 by senior officials in the German intelligence service, the BND, who wrote to the CIA warning his account was vague, second-hand and impossible to check. They also thought he was psychologically unstable.
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In January 2004, Vice-President Dick Cheney was maintaining that discovery of the germ warfare labs would provide "conclusive" proof that Iraq had developed WMDs. But US investigators sent into Iraq after the invasion to find evidence of WMDs uncovered Curveball's file in Baghdad. In his late 20s when he arrived in Germany, he had been a low-level trainee engineer and not the project chief as the CIA had claimed.
[ cf Iraqi weapons 'expert' unmasked as a fraud ]