LATimes on 'Curveball'

The LATimes produced a major story on 'Curveball', the INC provided intel source who was the source for significant amounts of the bad intel cited by the Bush administration in the runup to the Iraq war, like the mobile bioweapons labs. German intel repeatedly warned the US that the information was total fabrication. It's big, but if you've got the time, read this.

Just for a taste, I'll use a couple of clips,

An investigation by The Times based on interviews since May with about 30 current and former intelligence officials in the U.S., Germany, England, Iraq and the United Nations, as well as other experts, shows that U.S. bungling in the Curveball case was worse than official reports have disclosed.

The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years. ....

British intelligence also warned that spy satellite images taken in 1997 when Curveball claimed to be working at Djerf al Nadaf conflicted with his descriptions. The photos showed a wall around most of the main warehouse, clearly blocking trucks from getting in or out.

(A quick comment for some readers I have who are not big blog readers/internet news readers. There's a lot being written in blogworld about this, but it's generally not very concise. Keep an ear open to this story, it will be bouncing around for weeks, and you will get some of the detail and an idea of just how big a deal this is.)

Coupling this with the Al Libi information that was known to be false and used to back claims of Iraq Al Qeada ties, we now have the basis for some proof that the Bush administration wasn't just wrong on the prewar intel. By actively ignoring all the counter evidence, they were deliberately wrong. To me that's lying.

The real question going forward is whether this complex story can be distilled down into reasonably small bites so that the non-news junkie population can get a grip on just how bad this is.

This is the smoking gun that could take the shape of lies about a mushroom cloud.