Sunday, November 20, 2005 Curveball: Germans told US He was Bad Intelligence LATimes: 5 senior officials from Germany's Fedrl Intelligence Srvc (BND), said that they warned US intelligence authorities that the Iraqi defector named Curveball never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so. According to the Germans, Bush mischaracterized Curveball's info when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least 7 mobile factories brewing biological poisons, and then-Secretary of State Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the UN on 2/5/03. Curveball's German handlers for the last 6 yrs said his info was often vague, mostly 2ndhand and impossible to confirm, and they say they had told US officials that his info was 'not proven,' and were shocked when Bush and Powell used it in key prewar speeches: "This was not substantial evidence. We made clear we could not verify the things he said." And it gets better: The German authorities said that their informant suffered from emotional & mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst. Great... so American nutcases took the word of an ex-Iraqi nutcase when launching us into a war. Ach du liebe! |