Mirror.co.uk - THE BIG LIE: "In Cairo, on February 24 2001, [Colin] Powell said: 'He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.'"

The story of "well, if we were fooled about Saddam's WMD, so was everybody else" is being spread, probably to prepare for the (late) delivery of the David Kay report which was promised to us in "mid-September". But as that quote of Colin Powell's shows, either (a) a whole lot of new evidence was gathered betwee February and September 2001, or the interpretation of the data we had changed. Personally, I think that we, like everybody else with an intelligence service had a lot of scattered bits of information. Some of it was stale, some seems to have been planted through Iraqi defectors, some was about things that were suspicious but unknown (like the "unaccounted for" WMD that now seem to have been accounting problems), and some was (unavoidably) wrong.

All the major players (France, Germany, Israel, as well as the UK and US) seem to have had this information. The key difference is that no one else decided to build a Frankenstein's monster of foreign policy from it. It's not the data that differentiates us from France on this issue, it's the interpretation.

What led the administration into the world of faith-based intelligence, where a Don Rumsfeld could say "we know where the WMD are" and keep his job? Where a Paul Wolfowitz could proclaim that Iraq would be able to pay for the reconstruction and keep his job? Where Gen. Shinseiki could lose his job for telling what turns out to be the truth about the number of troops required to police post-war Iraq?

I don't know, but I'll sleep a lot better when they're out of office.