"Curveball" Lied About WMD In Iraq

Well, looks like we were had.

An Iraqi defector, codenamed Curveball, who allegedly helped convince the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had a secret stash of biological and chemical weapons, has admitted for the first time that he made it all up.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi told The Guardian that he invented the stories to help topple Saddam Hussein, but was shocked when the US used tales as an excuse to go to war.

"I did that for a number of reasons," he said. "Firstly because of my people, the Iraqi people. The old regime was a dictatorship and that caused a lot of problems for our country."

"I had to do something for my country. So I did this and I am satisfied, because there is no dictator in Iraq any more."

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," Janabi observed. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

It was just over eight years ago that US Secretary of State Colin Powell took Janabi's claims to the United Nations.

Sickening. Several thousand lives, trillions of dollars, and our national reputation, not to mention the cost to the Iraqis. And even THIS sad sack is stunned that the Bush Administration made him a primary source for their case to go to war in Iraq. Now that Donald Rumsfeld, the then Secretary of Defense, has admitted there were no WMD, maybe we can have an intelligent discussion of what went on here.