In the annals of warfare there’s most-likely not been a most-obvious display of immoral lying than the case of George Jr.’s adventure into Iraq.

Not only 4,436 US military people have been killed, nearly 33,000 wounded (estimates there top 100,000, not including the number of GIs suffering from PTSD and other problems), the illegal, murderous invasion created a monstrous killing field within Iraq – a new study reveals more than 90,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in just the first five years of the 2003 horror-blunder: Researchers have found that while coalition forces accounted for 12 per cent of deaths and Iraqi forces 11 per cent, the vast majority of violent killings were killed by unknown perpetrators. Of those by far the biggest proportion – around a third of the total – was summary executions and kidnappings between rival factions and gangs as law and order broke down.

This, I believe, is what damn-dumb Don Rumsfeld might have called an ‘unknown, unknown.’

And what has become over time, a known, known, was the feat of a Iraqi guy nicknamed, ‘Curveball‘ — so called by German and US intelligence agents because they figured the little shit was throwing a curveball on Iraqi WMD, or maybe just lying.
And sure enough.
From the UK’s the Guardian this week comes the admission from Curveball, i.e., Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, that he indeed had been lying: “Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right,” he said. “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.”
Read the Guardian‘s background piece on Curveball here.

And of course, ‘Curveball‘ sucked in Colin Powell, who blubbered a huge string of lies before the UN in February 2003, pushing for resolution for an invasion.
This is usually defined as the defining moment for the great lies George Jr.’s crew created to push for war against Iraq — and this bogus material was distributed via the US MSM as if it were reality.

And the horror unleashed.
From Powell’s speech:

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.
…
Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.

And Powell even brought in ‘Curveball’ himself:

The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs. He was also at the site when an accident occurred in 1998. Twelve technicians died from exposure to biological agents.
…
This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.

And the rest, as they sometimes say, is some real, real-bad history.

After the carnage, and today (Wednesday), the Guardian reported in an interview with Powell, the led-astray-former-secretary-of-state demands some satisfaction: “It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable,” he told the Guardian. “The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn’t known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president’s state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN.”

And what thinks ‘Curveball‘?

“The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories.
For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it.
Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me.”

George Jr. and The Dick hooked a lie, although any lie would have worked, this particular one was vital.
From November 2007 and former CIA senior official Tyler Drumheller on CBS‘ “60 Minutes“: “If they had not had Curve Ball they would have probably found something else. ‘Cause there was a great determination to do it. But going to war in Iraq, under the circumstances we did, Curve Ball was the absolutely essential case.”

Why there’s no criminal case against these guys is beyond me — yet it was a bit heart-warming, and rightfully so, that George Jr. had to abandon a planned trip to Switzerland due to unruly mobs and legal action.
Some satisfaction there, I guess, but it’s graded on a low, slow curve.