How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of ‘Curveball’

Five senior officials from Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service … warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

The German authorities … also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. “He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy,” said a BND official who supervised the case. “He is not a completely normal person,” agreed a BND analyst.

If the United States was able to go war with Iraq based hearsay from a crazy guy nicknamed Curveball, then wait’ll you see what we do with the intelligence on Syrian WMDs we’re getting from our newest informant, Crazy Larry.

[T]he White House is lashing out at domestic critics, particularly Senate Democrats, over allegations the administration manipulated intelligence to go to war. Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney called such claims reprehensible and pernicious.

Senate Democrats quickly struck back, calling Cheney’s use of 150-point Scrabble words “superfluous” and “pleonastic.”

Vice President Cheney scoffed at the allegations, calling them a floccinaucinihilipilification of his criticisms, while accusing the Democrats of being blatantly hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic.

“Yeah,” President Bush chimed in. “And they’re dumb too. Dumb and bad.”

CIA officials now concede that the Iraqi fused fact, research he gleaned on the Internet and what his former co-workers called “water cooler gossip” into a nightmarish fantasy that played on U.S. fears after the Sept. 11 attacks.

You have to give the CIA a little credit. They did pull one of Curveball’s most explosive allegations from the State Of The Union address at the last minute.

If they hadn’t, we would have gone to war over the claim that Saddam had broken up Ross and Rachel on Friends, and was threatening to do the same to Carrie and Mr. Big on Sex And The City.

Both accusations were corroborated by multiple sources, including Amir in Accounting, and Musaf from the 2nd desk to the left of the lunch room, by the Pepsi machine.

Despite the evidence, the CIA pulled the allegation after a last-minute report that Mr. Big had followed Carrie to Paris and was waiting for her in the lobby of her hotel with an engagement ring.

After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. inspectors struggled to unravel Baghdad’s secret biological weapons program. They speculated that the regime produced germs in mobile factories to evade detection.

In 1994, acting on tips from Israeli intelligence, U.N. inspectors even stopped red-and-white trucks in Baghdad marked: “Tip Top Ice Cream.” Inside they found ice cream.

Those goddamn Iraqis thought they were so clever, disguising their weapons labs as ice cream trucks. But they were no match for us. Our crack team of CIA commandos went in and found the incriminating evidence we needed to justify an invasion:

A massive inventory of Bomb Pops.