Look, it's obvious that, now that we have had the luxury of going over Iraq's own files, that some of the intelligence we got seems to have been, if not mistaken, or misinterpreted, actively cooked.

It needs to be remembered that there was absolutely no way of proving this with any real certainty prior to the fall of Iraq. Who do you believe? Who do you ignore? If a defector tells you in detail about massive programs to produce weapons of mass destruction--and this was far from the only defector to do so--on which side do you err?

What if you ignore the data, and it turns out to have been right? Iraq already had a proven history of successfully hiding nuclear programs, which are far harder to conceal than biological ones. The U.N. cleared Iraq's first nuclear program, that Israel eventually had to take out, and missed entirely the follow-on nuclear program that was only eliminated after the first Gulf War. A rational person might be excused for tending to believe that Saddam would be trying the same thing again. (As an interesting aside, go back and look who voted in Congress against the first Gulf War, without which Saddam and Sons would currently be in Kuwait, and squatting comfortably on a nuclear arsenal.)

In any case, the issue I am trying to bring out in this particular case is that this particular intelligence wasn't being filtered out through the Kurds, or Israel, or any other outfit that might have an axe to grind with Iraq.

It came out through Germany, a nation highly opposed to military action in Iraq. This would be like getting a package of aerial photos of suspected nuclear production facilities in Iraq from France.

I think that's significant in some way. I'm sorry nobody else does.