“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. The source was an eyewitness.”
Those were the words of Colin Powell, and Colin Powell was an honorable man—the first African American to serve on the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first African American to be Secretary of State. He was reluctant to support the Bush administration’s drive for an invasion of Iraq and agreed to do so only if he could get an international coalition to join the effort.
It was when he was speaking before the United Nations to try to consolidate that coalition that he made the statement above.
What was supposedly based on “solid intelligence” was Powell’s claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Anyone who saw his presentation on television remembers the drawings that accompanied it, drawings purporting to show trucks containing biological weapons laboratories in a clandestine location.
What Powell later said he didn’t know was that the Defense Intelligence Agency had categorized the “eyewitness” and source for the drawings, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, known as “Curveball,” as unreliable.
Powell’s effort to create the “Coalition of the Willing” was successful. The coalition was formed to help with the military venture in Iraq, and even more to convince the world that other governments shared the Bush administration’s opinion of the country—and a war that would last 10 years and kill over 100,000 Americans and Iraqis went forward.
Now, after 10 years of bloodshed and destruction, the man who swore to Western intelligence officials that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had WMD has made a confession that will hardly comfort the families of soldiers blown to bits in the campaign to prevent such weapons from being unleashed:
He lied.
Janabi was a chemical engineer who desperately wanted to see Saddam Hussein removed from power. Since that was beyond his people’s capabilities, he wanted American firepower to do it.
“My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remained in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime’s oppression,” he told Michael Rudin, producer of the BBC series Modern Spies, which included an interview with Janabi.
In 2000, Janabi told the German secret service that he had supervised the building of a mobile bioweapons lab. Other information contradicted that, but Janabi’s claim took on a life of its own in the hands of American intelligence and an administration bent on war.
Janabi isn’t the only one who’s in confession mode this spring, according to this report from the Guardian: “U.S. officials ‘sexed up’ Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell’s former chief of staff. ‘I brought the White House team in to do the graphics,’ he says, adding how ‘intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy.'”
And the dead, the maimed, the deadly fires and explosions on Iraqi streets, the IEDs, the refugees, the shortages of food, water, medicine, electricity? Janabi told the Guardian that he was grieved because people died in the war, but that “there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities.”
