THOMAS R. EDDLEM
New American
April 2, 2012
The London Independent newspaper published the words from a video confession with the Iraqi most responsible for false intelligence reports that brought the U.S. to war with Iraq April 1. “We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie,” the interviewer said to Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi — codenamed “Curveball.” Al-Janabi replied simply: “Yes.”
“It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history,” the Independentexplained, “with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi’s lies used to justify the Iraq war.” Al Janabi’s reports were the highlight of sensational reports of Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories in Colin Powell’s (above left) speech to the United Nations February 5, 2003, a speech filled with falsehoods about alleged Iraqi nuclear and biological programs that later proved to have been dormant for a decade. “My main purpose,” al-Janabi said without apology, “was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression.”
Al-Janabi, who had fled Iraq after being charged for common theft, acknowledged he was simply telling the war-hungry White House what it wanted to hear. “I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,” (see below) he told the Independent, adding how “intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy.” Al-Janabi had fled to Germany in 1999 on a tourist visa and initially told German immigration officials the truth that he had embezzled money from the Iraqi television station where he worked, but was able to speed up the asylum process when he started weaving tales about witnessing mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The interview published in the Independent was not the first time al-Janabi had admitted to lying about Iraqi biological weapons programs. He also confessed to the London Guardian back in February of 2011 that he had lied: “I did this and I am satisfied, because there is no dictator in Iraq any more.” As in theIndependent piece this year, al-Janabi expressed no remorse for causing the war that resulted in the deaths of some 100,000 Iraqis, as well as thousands of American and British soldiers.
“I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime,” he told the Guardian in a series of interviews carried out in his native Arabic and German. “I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy.”
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