Thursday, June 19, 2008

Home of der Whopper

This is nothing short of stunning.

So we went to war based on bad intelligence. A group of neo-conservatives cherry picked intel about the Iraqi program for weapons of mass destruction and used it to sell an unpopular war. The main informant was an agent named "Curveball." When the President of the United States said,

we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents, and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities.
it was Curveball who sold them on it through reports from German intelligence that the Germans said were not credible. Curveball's story was bought without ever having American intelligence agents actually talk to the man...if they had, they may have figured out what employees at Burger King quickly realized...

The LA Times tracked down Curveball who is in exile Germany...fleeing corruption charges in Iraq. "Curveball has flipped burgers at McDonald's and Burger King, washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant and baked pretzels in an all-night bakery."
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."
So we were led into a war because our President and his administration were outfoxed by a man that couldn't fool teenagers working at Burger King.