The invasion of Iraq could've been prompted in large part due to a Foster Brooks-like informant!

If it wasn't so damn sad and shameful, this would be hilarious. From the LA Times:

The only American who met a now-discredited Iraqi defector codenamed "Curveball" repeatedly warned the CIA before the war that the Baghdad engineer appeared to be an alcoholic and that his dramatic claims that Saddam Hussein had built a secret fleet of mobile germ weapons factories were not reliable.

In response, the deputy director of the CIA's Iraqi weapons of mass destruction task force — part of the agency's counter-proliferation unit — suggested in a Feb. 4, 2003, e-mail that such doubts were not welcome at the intelligence agency.

"As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn't say, and the powers that be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he's talking about," the CIA official wrote, according to information released Friday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to support the Senate Intelligence Committee's blistering, 511-page critique of America's prewar intelligence.

"However, in the interest of truth," the e-mail continued, "we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations."

No evidence suggests such a warning was given, however. And Curveball — the chief source of repeated U.S. assessments that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program — turned out to be a fraud.

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On Feb. 5, 2003 — one day after the CIA official wrote the e-mail that "this war" would happen — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell repeatedly cited Curveball's information as he painted a graphic portrayal of "biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails" for the U.N. Security Council.

Powell called the alleged germ-producing vehicles "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq."

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The one American who had met Curveball in May 2000 expressed his doubts, however.

The unidentified official "thought this guy might be an alcoholic and that bothered him a lot," a CIA analyst familiar with the case told Senate investigators. The official repeatedly "locked horns" with the CIA's lead analyst on Iraq's biological weapons "over the reliability" of the defector's account.

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The American official later told Senate staffers that he had "had many discussions" with CIA analysts prior to 2003 "about my concerns with Curveball as this whole thing was building up and taking on a life of its own. I was becoming frustrated, and when [I was] asked to go over Colin Powell's speech … and I went through the speech, and I thought: 'My gosh, we have got — I have got to go on record and make my concerns known.' "

To help determine who was right, the Senate Intelligence Committee staff last fall asked U.S. intelligence officials for an assessment of Curveball and his reliability. The results were not reassuring.

In December, the DHS intelligence officer who had been responsible for collecting and reporting intelligence from Curveball's debriefings in Germany wrote a report for the committee asserting that the defector "is not a biological weapons expert" and "never claimed that the project he was involved in was used to produce biological agents."