All the intelligence agencies around the world thought Saddam had WMDs...

[kentuck]

...except France, Germany, Russia, and all the other countries except Great Britain. That's why they were against the invasion. So it is another bald-faced lie by the Administration when they say that all the intelligence agencies of every other country thought Saddam had WMDs. They did not. Just another day and another lie....

[HereSince1628]

1. You left out Israel. They thought Iraq had WMD's too.

And if any conspiracy hypothesis is worth pursuing it is the question of just how much intelligence Feith, Franklin and their Likud buddies were moving between Israel and the White House.

[Jacobin]

9. heh heh

Yep. I recall in the run up to war that of all the countries polled on whether they were in favor of the invasion, the U.S. and Israel were the ONLY two countries in favor of it.

go figure..........

[Nimrod2005]

2. Right on...! more..........

In addition, not all of the people/countries were investigating what Saddam had or did not have --- BECAUSE NOONE ELSE WAS OBSSESSED With Saddam other than your favorite NOCONS bastards.


Therefore, all intelligence in the world about Saddam and Iraq came from the good ol' USA!!! Them the Nazi party of eveil-doers...

[drmom]

11. They were'nt obsessed with Sadam... I think they wanted us to be obsessed

hence the massive propaganda push.

[autorank]

3. Great line..."just another day and another lie." We'll hear this again.

[democrat in Tallahassee]

4. Poland. You forgot Poland.

[kentuck]

5. But the only intelligence they had was what we gave them....

..as with many other nations. They only knew what we told them.

[underpants]

6. ..until the UNMOVIC inspectors reported there were none

and thats when the bombing started :eyes:

It is amazing to look back at the actual timeline and realize that.

[Brotherjohn]

7. Actually, even British intelligence did NOT reach the same conclusions.

That's why Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 (the British CIA), said the following:

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

"The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

To my knowledge, this document's authenticity has been validated (even implicitly by Tony Blair himself) and Dearlove has not contradicted this statement attributed to him.

[many a good man]

8. Parsing grammar: They HAD them...in the 80s

No one disputes that. Most were destroyed in the Gulf War. The UN inspectors in Iraq destroyed more between 1991-98. Clinton kicked out the inspectors in 1998 and bombed all remaining suspected stockpiles.

The Iraqi government's own documentation pointed to a specific amount of bio-chem agents that were never accounted for. It is suspected these agents never existed, except on paper, a result of fudging by Saddam's scientists to appear more productive. Nevertheless, these inventories were supposed to have been created prior to and during the Gulf War and were thus far past their shelf life.

Foreign intelligence agencies and the UN agreed with this assessment. UNMOVIC was unable to definitively account for these phantom book entries. Nevertheless, they determined Iraq had NO capability to produce further NBC weapons. The US and GB tried to sell the UN on a war based on this flimsy non-evidence and thus started an illegal war.

So...is it really a "lie" or just a tortured "misleading"? Legalistically, it may not be an outright lie, per se. Morally, its a lie of epic proportions.

[Brotherjohn]

10. Parsing grammer II: They thought they "had" some chem/bio weapons.

That's an entirely different matter than the phantom nukes Bush used to scare us into war. Yet Bush cleverly says that all these intelligence agencies thought Saddam had "WMDs".

Regarding that and nearly every other point of evidence the Bush administration presented (without known caveats, phrasing so as to imply something which was not supported by evidence, etc.):

A LIE OF OMISSION IS STILL A LIE

Definition of a "lie":
1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.
2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression.
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/lie_2