Curveball and Colin Powell

Der Spiegel is breaking a big story this week about Curveball and just what sort of garbage Washington accepted as “intelligence” in the months before the Iraq war. Curveball was the codename for an Iraqi who wanted asylum in Germany and told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear — in this case fictional details about weapons in Iraq, details that were handed “raw” from Berlin to Washington and up to Colin Powell, who repeated them in his infamous 2003 speech about Iraq to the UN.

In March 2004, the CIA was finally, over a period of two days, able to question “Curveball” directly. The Americans were horrified, and they quickly became convinced that the Iraqi invented the whole story.

We’ve written about Curveball before, in an old column called Hack Work.

     posted 23 March 2008 by Michael Scott Moore