By Anne Penketh,

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. He was questioned by German intelligence in the late 1990s when seeking asylum in Germany and told them that he had witnessed a biological weapons programme in Iraq. His "evidence" was made public in a compelling speech to the UN security council by US secretary of state, Colin Powell on 5 February 2003, when he said that Iraq possessed stockpiles of biological weapons that threatened the world and the mobile weapons laboratories to produce them.

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."

Bush, McCain “gaffes” on Iran echo Iraq war lies

Within the past week, both US President George W. Bush and the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the 2008 presidential election, Senator John McCain, have made widely broadcast statements about Iran that are as demonstratively false as they are provocative.

In an interview taped as part of a US propaganda broadcast to Iran on the occasion of the Persian new year, President Bush said Thursday that Iran’s government has “declared that they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people—some in the Middle East.” He added, “That’s unacceptable to the United States, and it’s unacceptable to the world.” The remarks were broadcast over Radio Farda, a State Department-funded, Farsi-language station.

The broadcast prompted an article in Friday’s Washington Post that carried the subhead: “Experts Say President Is Wrong and Is Escalating Tensions.”

“The Iranian government is on the record across the board as saying it does not want a nuclear weapon,” Suzanne Maloney, a State Department specialist on Iran until last year, told the Post. “There’s plenty of room for skepticism about these assertions. But it’s troubling for the administration to indicate that Iran is explicitly embracing the program as a means of destroying another country.”

Bush’s remarks came just two days after McCain gave a press conference in Jordan in which he delivered his own charges against Iran.

McCain’s statement, which has been widely published and rebroadcast, was given in the context of a Middle East tour together with fellow Senate Armed Service Committee members that was designed to showcase the Arizona senator as a credible “commander-in-chief.”

His assertion that the Iranian government, dominated by Shia clerics, was supporting the Sunni Islamist group Al Qaeda, was widely described in the media as an “embarrassing gaffe,” and pounced on by the Democrats as indicative of his lack of foreign policy expertise.

Speaking to reporters in Amman, McCain said that he was concerned about the Tehran government “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back” into Iraq.

He was challenged by a reporter who presumably understood that the Tehran government has close ties with Shia parties in Iraq that have waged a sectarian war against Sunnis in general and that Al Qaeda has been blamed for numerous terrorist attacks on Shia civilians.

McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known, and it’s unfortunate.”

Standing next to him at the microphone, Senator Joseph Lieberman, McCain’s “Democratic-Independent” ally, whispered in the Republican candidate’s ear. McCain then corrected himself: “I’m sorry; the Iranians are training the extremists, not Al Qaeda. Not Al Qaeda. I’m sorry.”

wsws source