Well, the question is in part about whether European Intelligence services were collectors or consumers of information.

The found no real evidence, so they gulped the selective, filtered reports they received from the U.S. and UK.

Germany, for example, had neither serious interest nor much espionage capacity in Iraq. The BND was known to be leaning to believe the U.S. assertions, while most of the nation was not convinced.

The line was drawn not between informed and uninformed (as actually the intelligence services were NOT better informed than a normal citizen who read a newspaper records about the finished destruction of Iraqi WMD/missile inventories) ), but between those gullible enough to be convinced by so-called "evidence" that was essentially just made-up assertions (like the illusion of trailer bio weapon labs that wasn't more than a single unreliable report plus lots of virtual reality stuff) and those who still remembered what actual evidence looks like and were able to discern assertions from evidence.


The so-called evidence was fabricated, it was fabricated in order to meet the expectations of politicians who in turn used these fabrications to lie the public into a war.

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Let's try this logical route:

(1) There were no NBC weapons or weapons programs in Iraq.

(2) Therefore, there was no reliable evidence possible about such, instead there was at best a collection of poor interpretations of tiny info bits.

(3) Ergo, Cheney had impossibly enough hard evidence for his claims.

(4) Which in turn means by the definition of "lie" in notable dictionaries that Cheney lied and is therefore a liar.

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Which is just one of a gazillion of ways to show that he was lying.

It's actually quite easy to prove that something is as it is (Cheney=liar), while it is often impossible to prove that something is not (Iraq= no WMD).
That was the bad luck of Saddam - and now it's bad luck for Cheney, for it is simple to prove this trait.

The only difficulty in this thing is apparently to admit.

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By the way; I opened this hornet's nest with a side remark about the manipulation talents of Cheney/Rove. This turned into a quite fiery discussion about the reasons for the Iraq war - doesn't that look suspiciously like a very sensitive spot in the U.S.' flank?

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The debates were over how much, whether ..., and whether ...
You mean those debates that you remember now.

For I remember very different ones, including such that asked why the hell one would want to invade a country in order to get rid of its chemical weapons. That's the most reliable method of provoking their use (if they exist at all), after all. The whole rationale was illogical and questioned, and a decade of bullying and strangling Iraq made sure that U.S./UK assertions were not taken as credible without hard evidence in some debates that I saw.