Powell questions handling of Iraqi defector

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that U.S. intelligence officials should be questioned over their handling of “Curveball,” an Iraqi defector whose now discredited claims on weapons of mass destruction helped fuel the Bush administration’s drive to war in 2003. It has become clear over the years that “the source called Curveball was totally unreliable,” Powell said in a statement to CNN. “The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) as to why this wasn’t known before the false information was put into (a key intelligence estimate) sent to Congress, the president’s State of the Union address and my February 5 presentation to the U.N.” Powell, in an address to members of the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, said the U.S. government had “first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels.” “The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities,” Powell said at the time. “He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died.” Two months later, the invasion of Iraq began. No biological weapons, no germ labs, and no weapons of mass destruction were found. The defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, has admitted in an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper that he lied to help bring down Saddam Hussein‘s regime. “I had the chance to fabricate something, to topple the regime,” he said. “I did this, and I am satisfied, because there is no dictator in Iraq anymore.” When Alwan spoke to CNN in 2008, he said, “I never told anyone Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction.” At the time, intelligence sources told CNN that Alwan had claimed that Iraq had a secret bioweapons program. But now, Alwan admits that after he was granted asylum in Germany in 2000, he used his training as a chemical engineer to concoct for his debriefers a story of Iraqi WMD production. Although the CIA was not given a chance to interview Alwan directly, and German officials had questioned some aspects of Alwan’s story, his assertions were included in the material provided to Powell for his U.N. presentation. SH (TS) 481