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'Curveball' Turns Out To Be Two-Bit Con
Man by Hunter
Wed Jun 18, 2008 at 07:24:56 PM
PDT
The Los Angeles Times managed to track down
and interview Rafid Ahmed Alwan, a.k.a. the infamous 'Curveball', purveyor
of a remarkable series of stories on Iraq's supposed
biological weapons capabilities. It was he that came up with the "mobile weapons
labs" that Colin Powell showed cartoon drawings of at the United Nations, that
Iraq was attempting to smuggle WMD's from England, and that a collection of corn
sheds at Djerf al Nadaf were part of a secret biological weapons program. He now
lives in Germany.
As it turns out, of course, he bullshitted the whole
thing. In Iraq he was a con man, thief,
embezzler and general crook who was fired from job after
job.
He claimed, for example, that the son of his former
boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction
procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators
found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a
criminal mastermind. [...]
"Rafid told five or 10 stories every day," Freah said
in an interview. "I'd ask, 'Where have you been?' And he'd say, 'I had a
problem with my car.' Or, 'My family was sick.' But I knew he was
lying."
He had a gift for it and "was not embarrassed when
caught in a lie," Freah said.
At the Djerf al Nadaf warehouse, laborers treated
seeds from local farmers with fungicides to prevent mold and rot. But Alwan
convinced his BND handlers that the site's corn-filled sheds were part of
Iraq's secret germ weapons program.
He worked there, he told them, until 1998, when an unreported biological
accident occurred.
In fact, Alwan had been dismissed three years earlier,
in 1995, after inflating expenses and faking receipts for tools, supplies and
lamb for a party.
"I fired him," Freah said. "He was corrupt and he was
found stealing."
Even his fellow Burger King employees in
Germany knew him as a serial
liar...
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 his family,
his friends, his co-workers and his employers, from Iraqi warehouses to German
Burger Kings, all knew him to be a con man, crook and general nut. German
officials warned the Americans not to use information provided by
him, and weapons inspectors who investigated his claims before the war found
them false.
But that
still wasn't enough to keep
his valued "information" out of the hands of the special intelligence gathering
operations of Rumsfeld and Cheney, who then passed it to the press, or from
Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations, or from George W. Bush's 2003 State
of the Union address, or from any of the myriad other administration reports
used to justify the war. Truly, the Iraq War was a perfect example of a
group of con men getting together and deciding to believe each other's
stories.
Coalition deaths in the Iraq War have recently topped
4,100. The number of Iraqi deaths are not known, and not
counted ("but recent estimates put it at 1.3 million Iraqui deaths as a direct result of US Armed Forces" - whereabouts).