At that point in time as Sadam had just used WMDs against the Kurds and many observes thought it likely he had not all of a sudden stopped having them. That no one found any WMDs later on does not make reporting what intelligence agencies said at the time “lying”. Do you have any information that the Washington Post was reporting something they knew to be untrue _at the time_?
At the time it was very reasonable to assume Saddam had (more) WMDs. Stating otherwise is suffering from hindsight bias, there is really no reason to assume malice here.
That's just not true. The "source" for US intelligence was called Curveball and the information came from Germany. The German intelligence service, BND, warned the US multiple times that the information was made up. Even the CIA's head of the European division Tyler Drumheller said that he warned George Tenet that the information was unreliable[2]. Tyler Drumheller also said that "everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening"[3].
The informant was called:
- "crazy … out of control" (by German Intelligence)
- "congenital liar" (by Friends)
- "an alcoholic" (by US physician) [4]
UN weapons inspectors said at the time that the US is deliberately ignoring their information.
They KNEW for a fact that the information was false. It's not like they then found out that the information was bogus and that hindsight is 20/20 or something. It was known at the time.
It was also public knowledge in countries like Germany. Do you really think The Washington Post and other outlets don't check what the Germans had to say about all of this considering the information came from Germany? Not suspicious that the country where the information supposedly comes from doesn't want to support the war at all? Nope. The Washington Post and others didn't care. They wanted that war and supported it.
That's one source of information about WDMs being false, and that may indeed have been knowable at that time. But lack of proof does not prove the opposite, it does not prove that Saddam did not have WDMs.
Saddam had used WDMs on multiple occasions in the past and it was not unreasonable to think he would use them again, even without any proof he had any more. It's not all that hard to hide those weapons if you are a dictator. The US made the mistake of presenting this incorrect piece of information. But reporting reasonable sounding information from an intelligence agency, even if that later turns out to be false, does not make the Washington Post a "liar" or a "state mouthpiece", as the grand parent claimed.
> But reporting reasonable sounding information from an intelligence agency, even if that later turns out to be false, does not make the Washington Post a "liar" or a "state mouthpiece", as the grand parent claimed.
Sure sounds like being a state mouthpiece to me. That's kind of what uncritically echoing what a murderous government tells you, while refusing to give the time of day to anti-war voices like a good little lapdog is.
In regards to them being liars - kust read their reporting from the time, such as this article titled "Irrefutable"
"AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Powell left no room to argue seriously that Iraq has accepted the Security Council's offer of a "final opportunity" to disarm."
This reporting they did was a lie that helped sell a war under false pretences.
It wasn't UNREASONABLE but I wouldn't say it was VERY reasonable. At the time a number of traditional US allies did refuse to (openly) participate in the "Coalition of the willing". I think if you got your news from non-American and non-British sources at the time, I think there was far more uncertainty and doubt that Saddam had such weapons. I have heard this line before "Everybody at the time thought it" but I genuinely saw most people around me calling bullshit. There was a big sense of a grasping of straws from US intelligence, such as aluminium tubes being great evidence of nuclear development, and "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud".
In fact it was remarkable just how much more bias the American media was then the global media at the time, and it doesn't seem to me like the American media had any special reason to be more confident that Saddam was nuclear than any of the media in the rest of the world. My theory wasn't that American mainstream media outlets like WaPo and NYT were going out of their way to start a war under false pretences, it was more that they had a lot of incentives to be bias in a pro-war direction.
I live in Europe so I did get my news from non-US media sources. There were a lot of reasons not to go to war, especially in the way the US did. There was no UN backing yet and there was no good plan what to do with the country once Saddam was gone. But claiming you knew that Saddam had all of a sudden given up all his WDMs doesn't seem like a very strong one. This man violated countless UN resolutions about WDMs in the past, and now he all of sudden went straight? How is that a reasonable assumption? Also, it's not impossible he did have them after all and just hid them well.
