'Curveball' Talks About His Patriotic Lies

Getting good intelligence is hard in a world when so many people have their own personal axes to grind. But the Bush Administration was never interested in good intelligence: what they wanted was intelligence they wanted to hear, and they succeeded in getting that, as all powerful people eventually do. But Iraq is worse off, America's reputation has been permanently-damaged, and America's power has weakened in a critical area of the world as a result:

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."