The NHS & the United States of America

[Loyal Rogue]

The intelligence agencies in the US and UK are generally considered to be very capable.

They are, and they both concluded that Iraq had no WMDs and was no threat before the invasion.
That is why Bush had to manipulate and cherry-pick the intelligence, and outright lie to the American public via the media to build a case for war.

So, when they were concluding that Saddam had or was developing WMDs, it wasn't unreasonable that most, if not all, political leaders in the world took it as a given to be true.

Wrong.
The Downing Street Memos showed that the UK knew the "facts were being fixed" around Bush's political policy and they had to make the decision to either stand with the truth against their longtime ally or support the conspiracy.
http://downingstreetmemo.com/memotext.html

Remember "Freedom Fries"? LOL
France, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada were just some of our allies that were against the invasion and argued that there was no evidence of WMDs beforehand.

On balance, I'll add that I also find it surprising that those agencies could be as wrong as they apparently were. However, I think that is more a product of people (myself included) to generally over-estimate the intelligence gathering capability of the CIA, etc. For whatever reason, it feels like those guys know everything. But, maybe there's a lot more room for error and misinterpretation in that business than we realize.

I find it surprising that you would continue to try and pull that old lie out as if you really believe it.

Bush had to create his own alternative "intelligence" office to support his case because the the real intelligence agencies including the CIA didn't.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020802387.html

Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community

Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."

the inspector general concluded that Feith's assessment in 2002 that Iraq and al-Qaeda had a "mature symbiotic relationship" was not fully supported by available intelligence but was nonetheless used by policymakers.

Feith, who was defense policy chief before leaving the government in 2005, was one of the key contributors to the administration's rationale for war. His intelligence activities, authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, and coordinated with Vice President Cheney's office, stemmed from an administration belief that the CIA was underplaying evidence of then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's ties with al-Qaeda.

The two key pieces of "evidence" Bush used as the basis for the invasion were both known to be unreliable and false long before the invasion.
1) The drunken liar "Curveball" who the Germans warned us against using.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/03/iraq.usa1
and
2) The infamous aluminum tubes which Condoleezza Rice got up in front of the nation and told us were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," and "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." a full year after our own government's nuclear experts told her were not usable for a nuclear program and were most likely only for small artillery rockets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/in...rint&position=

And lets not gloss over the fact that Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector told us that there was no evidence of WMDs or nuclear programs before the invasion and that Saddam was providing full access even while Bush was on TV telling the American public the exact opposite... which SOME people on here would still have us believe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2...raq.iraq/print

But Mr Blix, who has since retired to Sweden, said his inspectors found no compelling evidence that Iraq had a hidden arsenal or was blocking the work of the inspectors. He said there had been only small infractions by Iraq.

"We did express ourselves in dry terms but there was no mistake about the content," he said. "One cannot say there was compelling evidence. Iraq was guilty only of small infractions. The government should have re-evaluated its assessment in the light of what the inspectors found.

"We reported consistently that we found no weapons of mass destruction and I carried out inspections at sites given to us by US and British intelligence and not found anything."

Or the fact that 2 weeks before the invasion the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told us the same thing.

the head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them.

With all the exposed lies and the information available in this day and age, for anyone to try and pretend that the Iraq invasion was based on anything even remotely legitimate is nothing more than an attempt to play us all for a fool... again.

It's like a criminal who tries to rob a bank with a toy gun hidden in his jacket. You don't blame the police for using lethal force against the criminal when he points the toy gun at them. The criminal had the option to surrender and disclose that the gun was fake. The police had to assume the gun was real in order to protect themselves.

Actually it was more like a crooked cop who shoots an unarmed suspect for personal reasons and then plants a gun on the body afterwards... except in this case Bush forgot to plant the gun.