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Newsflash #1: Political asylum seekers lie and embellish in order to get asylum. See Ayaan Hirsi Ali for example. Their choice is to lie or be denied asylum.
Newsflash #2: Political dissidents and exiles lie and exaggerate in order to enlist the help of powerful countries and sway political opinion in their favor. Tin-pot dictators only pose a threat to that segment within their civilian population that opposes them but you won't get anywhere telling the truth. Much better to portray them as an existential threat to the entire planet. As a bonus it makes you look like a great hero for opposing them.
Newsflash #3: UN inspectors were in Iraq following up on the leads provided by Curveball and company. Not a single lead panned out! You don't need to be an intelligence officer with years of training to figure out that you're dealing with an unreliable source or worse a plant or a double-agent (a plant or a double-agent would have provided some good info to protect their credibility). Even Dubya should have figured that one out. Of course he and his administration didn't want to know the truth because it would have deprived them of their casus belli. The American media and the American public can't see the forest for the trees. They are so involved in the minutiae of how knew what when and who fed what dis-information to whom that they forget this simple and obvious fact.
