Curveball

I don't know whether it was malicious warmongering or just tragic groupthink, but we need better checks to ensure things like this don't happen again:

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm.

"This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."

The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, 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.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year.

Why the administration based decisions on whether to go to war on a guy code-named "curveball" is anyone's guess. Given the Germans' insistence that the intelligence was unverifiable, it's no surprise the way they reacted when the US decided to go to war - I don't think I'd join up with someone who'd ignored warnings like that. I'd bet the White House were just too convinced they were right to back down by that point, though.