History will not be kind to American leaders who called for war with Iraq. More evidence of naive incompetance has come forward:

[CBS’ 60 Minutes] says Mr Alwan’s story unravelled once CIA agents finally confronted him with evidence contradicting his claims.

Back in November 2005, Col Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Mr Powell, told the BBC’s Carolyn Quinn he was aware the Germans had said that they had told the CIA of the unreliability.

“And then you begin to speculate, you begin to wonder was this intelligence spun; was it politicised; was it cherry-picked; did in fact the American people get fooled?,” Col Wilkerson said.

A presidential intelligence commission into the matter found that Curveball [Mr Alwan] was a liar and an alcoholic.

Interesting that the Germans did not bite on false information, but the US fell for it at the highest levels.

Vagabond Scholar has a nice writeup of the tragic details.

Psychologists have long known that typically, human beings tend to look for evidence to support their views, not for evidence to contradict them. This dynamic makes the thorough vetting of critical intelligence all the more crucial.

[…]

The Bush administration must take a large share of the blame. Many people forget, as mentioned above, that Bush claimed weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found, and he repeated this claim several times. He later went on to deliberately substitute the argument that “Hussein had WMD” to “Hussein wanted WMD.”

[…]

No one doubted Hussein wanted WMD. The question was whether he had them, and whether he could actually get them.

Wonder where the name curveball came from.