re: Spin, spin, spin
There's no denying that this is a complex and confusing situation. There's a lot of ambiguity, and you brought up a lot of examples, suggestive things like satellite photos showing what Powell asserted were decontamination trailers, but Heinlein's Fair Witness would have to describe as simply tractor-trailer rigs.
I've tended to focus on the concrete statements made by Bush and his people. Powell, in his testimony to the UN, twice used the phrase "these are not allegations, these are facts". Well, facts are amenable to proof, and if it's a fact that Iraq had huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and a nuclear program within months of producing a weapon, where are they?
For Saddam to be as innocent as everyone makes him out to be, our intelligence agencies, and those of Britain and other nations, would not have had to lie or screw up once, or twice, or ten times, but dozens of times. All of the above and much more would have to be either mistaken or false. I do not find this plausible.
Plausibility is no substitute for proof. To cite just one example, Creation "Scientists" make all sorts of plausible arguments, but they can't prove their case.
That such contraband was moved and hidden is much more plausible IMO in light of all the evidence than the idea that it was never there.
Sometimes plausibility is a matter of opinion. The Bush case for war against Iraq--in fact, the Bush Doctrine of preventative war--is based on possession of superb intelligence. On the one hand you argue that we had solid intelligence about Iraqi WMD, to the level of knowing that it was being moved between facilities in Iraq to avoid UN inspectors...but on the other hand you blithely claim it could have been smuggled completely out of the country without our knowing about it, in a period when Iraq was under intense surveillance and surrounded by our forces as we prepared for war.
Do you see any logical flaws in that position?