Curveball news stories on Newser

Powell Aide: We Were Lied To

Kevin Spak — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:03:53 CST

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff says he thinks the secretary of state was deliberately lied to and manipulated by the vice president’s office in the lead-up to the Iraq war. “I think there was some manipulation of this material and there was some outright lying,” Lawrence Wilkerson told MSNBC’s...

Iraqi Defector Admits Lying About WMDs

Kevin Spak — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:32:35 CST

When Colin Powell gave his speech at the UN in February 2003 insisting that Iraq had biological weapons of mass destruction, he relied heavily on intelligence from a source codenamed “Curveball.” Well now Curveball, aka Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, tells the Guardian that he flat out made all of it...

Curveball's True Identity Comes to Light

Nick McMaster — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:56:44 CDT

Curveball, the Iraqi informant whose tall tales of mass weaponry helped push the US to war, has been identified by 60 Minutes as a lousy student—not the brilliant chemical engineer he claimed to be—who lied through his teeth to get his green card. This week's show names him...

Book Details How a Curveball Spun Into a War

Jonas Oransky — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:05:14 CDT

An Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, a primary source behind the WMD intelligence that inspired the invasion, is the subject of a new book that bears his handle, but the CIA is the most guilty party in author Bob Drogin's account. Analysts “twisted” and “magnified” the low-level engineer's stories beyond recognition,...