Things I Know I Know

The Washington Post lays out the shakiness of the evidence for an imminent threat from Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (and, remember, this is what we were told--an imminent threat--not a WMD program):

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:

• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.

• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.

..and so on.

The Kansas City Star breaks down Colin Powell's UN Security Council speech last February:

Powell said that "classified" documents found at a nuclear scientist's Baghdad home were "dramatic confirmation" of intelligence saying prohibited items were concealed this way.

U.N. inspectors later said the documents were old and irrelevant -- some administrative material, some from a failed and well-known uranium-enrichment program of the 1980s.

...

Powell noted Iraq had declared that it produced 8,500 liters of the biological agent anthrax before 1991, but U.N. inspectors estimated it could have made up to 25,000 liters. None has been "verifiably accounted for," he said.

No anthrax has been reported found.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, in a confidential report last September that has recently been disclosed, said that although it thought Iraq had biological weapons, it did not know their nature, amounts or condition.

Three weeks before the invasion, an Iraqi report of scientific soil sampling supported the regime's contention that it had destroyed its anthrax stocks at a known site, the U.N. inspection agency said May 30. Iraq also presented a list of witnesses to verify amounts, the agency said.

It was too late for inspectors to interview them; the war soon began.