Two intelligence investigations show Bush had plenty of reason to believe what he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address.
http://archive.is/vAWQa#selection-283.0-300.0
Don't let facts get in your way though.
The CIA operative Valery Plame was crucified because her husband (a diplomat) that investigated the yellow cake claim in Africa wrote about how it was a sham drummed up for the war.
"He didn't technically lie" - Sure he did. They knew what the truth was. They knew they needed an event to galvanize American support for action in the middle east. They knew what they were doing with how they worded the "War on Terror" lumping in Saddam with fucking Osama. When 75% of Americans think Saddam had something to do with 911, we are way past just cherry picking stats. We had psychopaths that were concurrently trying to extend American power and their own gain invade a country that had very high strategic interest.
I'm not even partisan about this. Most of the American politicians that I like are Republicans. This is complete horse shit.
Then Rumsfeld said they wouldn't find the WMDs. Then he tried to claim that the war was never about WMDs.
At that point I knew I had been 'had' by a completely (intellectually) dishonest asshole, or perhaps a set of them.
The final word on the 16 words may have to await history's judgment.
The administration created its own shadow intelligence operation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans) that, effectively, ignored CIA National Intelligence Estimates and cherry-picked unfiltered/unanalyzed intelligence to made the case for war.
This was a mission in need of justification. The Downing Street Memo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo) pretty much makes this not open to debate.
"Lie"? Well, there are different kinds of lying.
A Foreign Office official who helped draft the dossier, Tim Dowse, told the Chilcot inquiry that disputed claims that Iraq had acquired special aluminium tubes for a nuclear programme were included because the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, had publicly referred to them.
Both changes to the weapons dossier were part of a detailed process of comparing the British claims with US statements and those in a forthcoming CIA dossier. The comparisons were made on the express instructions of Campbell. He told the joint intelligence committee (JIC) chairman, John Scarlett, in a memo on 9 September 2002, that the British dossier should be "one that complements rather than conflicts with" US claims.
Documents that the information commissioner ordered to be released last year show that the drafters of the UK dossier compared its claims closely with the CIA dossier and raised possible contradictions over estimates of Iraq's capabilities.
The commissioner also accidentally released a secret list of documents that he allowed the government to withhold on national security grounds. These included an email dated 13 September 2002 "covering a copy of a Bush speech to compare with UK dossier claims". The Cabinet Office has confirmed the speech was the one Bush gave to the UN the day before.
A new draft of the British weapons dossier virtually eliminated the difference between the US and UK positions. When Blair presented the dossier to parliament 11 days later, he said that Iraq might get the bomb in "a year or two".
The JIC, which prepares formal intelligence assessments, considered the scenario so unlikely that it did not estimate how long it might take.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/10/alastair-campbell-...