Curveball Speaks: "He always lied," said a fellow Burger King worker
Rafid Ahmed Alwan -- the con man code-named "Curveball" -- may be one of the biggest enablers of the Iraq War other than Dick Cheney or Ahmed Chalabi. Alwan fled Baghdad for Germany, where he fed western intelligence officials all kinds of crazy lies about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction program in exchange for asylum. The Bush Administration seized on his easily discreditable claims about Iraqi mobile weapons labs to the point that Colin Powell referenced them in his presentation before the United Nations.
Now, as we discussed on the show today, Alwan is speaking up and claiming he has been misrepresented in the media. But according to this profile in the L.A. Times, co-written by Bob Drogin, who has been on the show several times(and who wrote the book on Curveball), Alwan was always a little loose with the facts:
"In early 2002, a year before the war, he [Alwan] told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.Ok, there are too many "whopper" jokes we can make right now, so we'll spare you. But, seriously, does this sounds like the kind of person you'd want to listen to before you decided to invade another country?
They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.
"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said.""
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