The Rolling Stone article starts …
“The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of
them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels
that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of
Thailand.
“On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the
crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring
and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The
officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an
accordion, around the man’s chest and another across his abdomen.
Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man’s brachial artery, on
the inside of his upper arm
“Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed
al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland
in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein.
For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on
rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale.
Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted
repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam’s men
to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in
subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath
the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in
Baghdad.
“It was damning stuff — just the kind of evidence the Bush
administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they
would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and
depose Saddam. That’s why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph
expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for
all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass
destruction.
“There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of
the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the
intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the
entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.”