<Was war fueled by wholesale deceit?

KEY QUOTES:

"I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world."

"Consider the now-disproven claims by Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously."

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year."

"Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and U.S. officials kept citing information from Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its WMD program in the early '90s."

"The CIA was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom."