Some facts: In 1999, an Iraqi man, claiming to be a chemical engineer, arrived in Germany seeking asylum. An official from Germany’s intelligence service, the BND, interviewed him about chemical weapons in Iraq. The man, given the code name Curveball, supplied spurious information, which made its way to the C.I.A. Though the BND raised questions about the source’s credibility, George W. Bush’s administration ran with the intel. In 2003, Congress declared war on Iraq with Curveball’s sham weapons-of-mass-destruction the casus belli, a catastrophic whoopsie that would lead to more than 4,000 American combat deaths.

Source: New York Times November 10, 2020 20:02 UTC