[link|http://www.odci.gov/nic/pubs/other_products/stu_iraq_wmd.html|Slams down each lie and distortion in detail]

There's too much to excerpt here. But I'll give you a listing of the myths debunked:

Myth #1: The Estimate favored going to war (It merely analyzed and reported facts, and it was the facts that favored this.)

Myth #2: Analysts were pressured to change judgments to meet the needs of the Bush Administration

Myth #3: NIE judgments were news to Congress

Myth #4: We buried divergent views and concealed uncertainties

Myth #5: Major NIE judgments were based on single sources (no, they didn't get all their info from NPR)

Myth #6: We relied too much on United Nations reporting and were complacent after UN inspectors left in 1998

Myth # 7: We were fooled on the Niger "yellowcake" story\ufffda major issue in the NIE

Myth #8: We overcompensated for having underestimated the WMD threat in 1991 (as if that would have been a bad thing)

Myth #9: We mistook rapid mobilization programs for actual weapons

And last but not least...

Myth #10: The NIE asserted that there were "large WMD stockpiles" and because we haven't found them, Baghdad had no WMD

Okay, I'm going to exceprt that last one:

From experience gained at the end of Desert Storm more than ten years ago, it was clear to us and should have been clear to our critics, that finding WMD in the aftermath of a conflict wouldn't be easy. We judged that Iraq probably possessed one hundred to five hundred metric tons of CW munitions fill. One hundred metric tons would fit in a backyard swimming pool; five hundred could be hidden in a small warehouse. We made no assessment of the size of Iraq's biological weapons holdings but a biological weapon can be carried in a small container. (And of course, we judged that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon.) When the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), led by David Kay, issued its interim report in October, acknowledging that it had not found chemical or biological weapons, the inspectors had then visited only ten of the 130 major ammunition depots in Iraq; these ammunition dumps are huge, sometimes five miles by five miles on a side. Two depots alone are roughly the size of Manhattan. It is worth recalling that after Desert Storm, US forces unknowingly destroyed over 1,000 rounds of chemical-filled munitions at a facility called Al Kamissiyah. Baghdad sometimes had special markings for chemical and biological munitions and sometimes did not. In short, much remains to be done in the hunt for Iraq's WMD.

I say:

And then there was [link|http://www.cpeo.org/lists/military/2000/msg00514.html|this little happening in Germany]. Makes you think... unless you try very hard not to.

As long as we find them before any bad guys do, we're golden. But let's be careful. Remember [link|http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/gulfwar/whiteper/|Al-Khamisiyah]. It's a very likely culprit in that Gulf War Syndrome.