>As to the false grounds, seems to me it was an honest mistake as everyone believed the whole WMD theory. Clinton used the "falsity" to bomb Iraq repeatedly.

Not everyone. Some contrary reading from the WashPost, Newsweek, New Yorker, Wikipedia, UPI, ...


Rice's (and Bush, Fleischer, Powell, Chaney, and Negroponte's) insistence that the aluminum tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs", was discounted at the time. "Indeed, two weeks before the State of the Union, the IAEA said that the tubes "were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment. Months earlier, the department of Energy had reached the same conclusion -- as had intelligence experts at the State Department."


On September 20, 2002, The United Press International reported that the there were:

... doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on September 8 that imported aluminum tubes 'are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs' a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence.


Powell in his UN speech used info provided by al-Libi came almost a month after a classified CIA report stated that info provided by al-Libi was unreliable. "A CIA document shows the agency in January 2003 raised questions about an Al Qaeda detainee’s claims that Saddam Hussein’s government provided chemical and biological weapons training to terrorists—weeks before President George W. Bush and other top officials flatly used those same claims to make their case for war against Iraq."


"WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons. The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons. "


The unclassified National Intelligence Estimate released to Congress a week before the war vote was considerably different than the classified version. The unclassified version gave "the impression that the intelligence community was much more confident and more united in its views than it actually was." And other parts of the document "appear designed to portray a sense of heightened threat, and particularly of a threat that could touch the U.S. homeland. Sentences and phrases in the classified NIE expressing uncertainty were deleted while new formulations alluding to gathering danger were added."


As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence. Chalabi’s defector reports were now flowing from the Pentagon directly to the Vice-President’s office, and then on to the President, with little prior evaluation by intelligence professionals. When INR analysts did get a look at the reports, they were troubled by what they found. “They’d pick apart a report and find out that the source had been wrong before, or had no access to the information provided,” Greg Thielmann told me. “There was considerable skepticism throughout the intelligence community about the reliability of Chalabi’s sources, but the defector reports were coming all the time. Knock one down and another comes along. Meanwhile, the garbage was being shoved straight to the President.”


The Administration has arranged for politically useful intelligence reports to be "stovepiped" directly from the C.I.A. to high officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In the past, raw information was rarely, if ever, forwarded past the C.I.A. without first being "vetted" for reliability. In effect, the Administration has established its own intelligence operations, without guidance or support from the established intelligence community. Among the results of this "stovepiping" is that the Administration can selectively leak information to support its positions to the press. As Hersh puts it, regarding information from Iraqi defectors: A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified "secret," would be funnelled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR [the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] analyses of the reports - invariably scathing but also classified - would remain secret.


As well as....

- British government officials, reporting in classified docs to Blair, say that the U.S. was fixing the intel & facts around the policy.

- the State of the Union speech writers ignore 2 CIA memos as well as a call from Tenet telling them to not use the Niger uranium claim, but they do it anyway.

- current Admin officials advocated preemptive military action long before Bush took office.