Thrown for a loop.

Curveball, you will recall, was the CIA's source for the fiction about Iraq's mobile biological weapons laboratories that the Bush admin peddled to justify the war. I doubt that in the entire history of espionage, a codename has ever inspired less confidence in the reliability of a source.

Now come Bob Drogin and John Goetz of the Los Angeles Times, with the news that, before the Bush gang trumpeted Curveball's phony story to the world, his German handlers had warned the CIA that they "could not verify the things he said," that he was not a "psychologically stable guy," and that his information was vague and mostly second-hand.

After we had invaded Iraq, the CIA found that in 1995, Curveball had been fired from the job in which he could have had any knowledge of biological weapons, that thereafter "he had been jailed for an apparent sex crime, and that for some time he drove a Baghdad taxi. His childhood friends called him 'a great liar' and 'a con-artist.' "UN inspectors finally disproved Curveball's claims in 2004, but by that time, of course, the Bush gang had the war it wanted.