The 'Curveball' that Took Americans to War and Killed Over a Million

In case you missed the story of the Iraqi curveball, a defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi

(SALEM) - As we lament the status of the war in Afghanistan; a situation that will soon simply be abandoned and lost... we are offered a reminder of what part of this went terribly wrong. It's called Iraq.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball, carries the dubious honor of having convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons program. It was just over a year ago, when he admitted for the first time that he lied about his story. He also said he watched in shock as it was used to justify a long, deadly war. It is a conflict that contaminated the terrain with death, despair and depleted uranium.

Curveball, told the Guardian that he fabricated his story of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in Iraq, as an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

As The Independent in the UK reported, the revelation came just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the UN in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on misinformation that Janabi provided to the German secret service, the BND; not a comforting thought.

It also landed on the heels of the disclosure in former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, where he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction program.

The careers of both Rumsfeld and Powell were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi's claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before 5 February 2003.

Tim King in 2008, covering the Iraq War

Tim King: Salem-News.com Editor and Writer

Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine.

Tim holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing from The Associated Press the National Coalition of Motorcyclists, the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs, Electronic Media Association and The Red Cross In a personal capacity, Tim has written 2,026 articles as of March 2012 for Salem-News.com since the new format designed by Matt Lintz was launched in December, 2005.

Serving readers with news from all over the globe, Tim's life is literally encircled by the endless news flow published by Salem-News.com, where more than 100 writers contribute stories from 20+ countries and regions.

Tim specializes in writing about political and military developments worldwide with an emphasis on Palestine and Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the U.S. Marines. You can write to Tim at this address: tim@salem-news.com. Visit Tim's Facebook page (facebook.com/TimKing.Reporter)

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