Flutterby™! : Lies admitted

The Independent — Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all.

"Curveball", the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.

He tries to defend his actions: "My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq because the longer this dictator remains in power, the more the Iraqi people will suffer from this regime's oppression."

What's most amazing isn't that he lied in order to topple a regime he hated, or even that those lies were amped up to provide Colin Powell's U.N. Security Council presentation material, it's two-fold:

1. That U.S. intelligence officials didn't corroborate that data, that they had such a hard-on for war that they just went blindly ahead on the say-so of one disgruntled person.
2. That those same bureaucrats are largely still doing what they've been doing.