CAUGHT BY A SCREWBALL

Not that truth seems to matter to the American electorate, but the Los Angeles reports that the source of information that Iraq purportedly had mobile weapons labs came from a source the U.S. never even interviewed.

The Times writes:

The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. ...

Based largely on his account, President Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the shadowy germ trucks, dubbed "Winnebagos of Death" or "Hell on Wheels" in news accounts, and they became a crucial part of the White House case for war — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's dramatic presentation to the U.N. Security Council just weeks before the war.

Thank goodness no one has yet come up with a "Volkswagen Beetle of Inconvenience."