And the games have begun

Photo by mayr

Lost in last week's hubbub was the news that "Curveball" -- the mysterious Iraqi engineer whose bogus claims on Saddam's weapons capabilities were used by Team Bush to justify invading Iraq -- has been outed:

An Iraqi engineer who provided the information that became one of the key planks in the Bush administration's case justifying the invasion of Iraq has been tracked down by undercover reporters to a drab residential block in southern Germany.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan, code-named Curveball (a baseball term for deception), has been in hiding since the invasion five years ago, and lives under an assumed name.

The German government's got him hidden away, and for good reason: I can imagine a number of people who would want him dead.

But get this:

Although German intelligence officials had warned the CIA that Curveball's claims were unreliable, and UN inspectors had failed to corroborate them, the Bush administration promoted the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion.

Now Curveball denies having made the claims in the first place. The BBC 2 programme Newsnight broadcast last night secretly filmed footage of the discredited agent who was approached by Der Spiegel magazine in his German hideout where he declined to give a formal interview. His face was blanked out in the footage in which a reporter asked him on his doorstep whether he had ever spoken about Iraq's biological weapons. Curveball replied "No."

I wonder why this news didn't lead all the evening news broadcasts or make the front pages of our papers. Instead, our media was either freaking out about Jeremiah Wright or about whether Hillary faced sniper fire in Tuzla ten years ago.