“Curveball” Denies Claiming Existence of Iraqi WMD

An Iraqi defector has denied making false allegations about alleged Iraqi WMD programs that helped bolster the Bush administration’s case for invasion, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 2, 2007).

In an interview published yesterday, Rafid Ahmed Alwan told Der Spiegel that he was “not to blame” for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (see GSN, March 20).

“I never said that Iraq had weapons for mass destruction,” the man best known as “Curveball” was quoted as saying.  “Not at all, not in my entire life.” 

According to various reports, Alwan after defecting to Germany claimed that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapon laboratories.  Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell referenced the information in a prewar presentation before the U.N. Security Council.  No evidence of active WMD efforts has been found in Iraq since the invasion and Curveball’s claims have been refuted (Associated Press/PR-inside, March 20).

Meanwhile, former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer yesterday defended his nation’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, the Australian Associated Press reported.

“It was the right thing to do, to get rid of a brutal dictator,” he said on ABC Radio.  “Although weapons of mass destruction weren't found subsequently, we didn't obviously know that at the time five years ago.”

“What we did discover was that Saddam Hussein did have a program to re-establish weapons of mass destruction,” he said (Australian Associated Press/World News Australia, March 20).

Elsewhere, a study funded by the U.S. Defense Department has established links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and various terrorist entities, although it did not uncover documented evidence of regime ties to al-Qaeda, the Washington Times reported today.

“Iraq was a long-standing supporter of international terrorism,” says the report by the independent Institute for Defense Analyses, which studied recently declassified documents in making its assessment.

Its investigation determined that the Hussein government supported Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that later merged with al-Qaeda under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Iraqi Intelligence Service under Hussein also sent officials to meet with Palestinian terrorist organizations and trained numerous non-Iraqi Arabs to carry out attacks in Israel, the study found (Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times, March 21).

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