The Iraqi defector told BBC2 show Modern Spies that the Iraq war was founded on lies he told about biological weapons.
Defending his decision to fabricate stories that would lead to a nine-year war that has claimed more than 100,000 lives, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi said: “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.”
Al-Janabi’s lies about the building of a mobile biological laboratory were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell during a UN Security Council meeting in 2003.
When programme makers put it to al-Janabi that “we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, the Iraqi replies: “Yes.”
Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, also admitted on the show that US officials “sexed up” al-Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs.
“Intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy,” Wilkerson said.
Picture: Getty
