the "intelligence" was essentially lies: the Niger nukes, eg. Plus all the hogwash that Chalabi was feeding to the OSP, and the press, some of which at least Wolfowitz seems to have had at least some faith in.
I think, if you fix a race, or an election, it means the result is - at least in some sense - a "fabrication"; but there's a whole other can of semantic worms, I imagine.. ;-)
Check out the story of Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son in law (I think McGovern made a reference during his initial presentation to the recent DSM forum). The story is at
http://www.middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.htmlVery briefly: "Gen. Hussein Kamel, the former director of Iraq's Military Industrialization Corporation, in charge of Iraq's weapons programme, defected to Jordan on the night of 7 August 1995, together with his brother Col. Saddam Kamel. Hussein Kamel took crates of documents revealing past weapons programmes, and provided these to UNSCOM" - this guy knew
all about Iraqi WMD.
In his debriefing interview, he stated:
* "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
(p. 13).
* "I made the decision to disclose everything so that Iraq could return to normal." (p.8)
* "we changed the [VX] factory into pesticide production. Part of the establishment started to produce medicine ... We gave insturctions not to produce chemical weapons." (p.13).
Pretty categorical. See the link for his whole interview.
However:
* Prime Minister Tony Blair in his statement to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, said: "It was only four years later after the defection of Saddam's son-in-law to Jordan, that the offensive biological weapons and the full extent of the nuclear programme were discovered."
* President Bush declared in a 7 October 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."
* Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."
* In a speech on 26 August 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself".
Now that sort of cherry-picking is so egregious as to amount to fabrication, imo. There *is* such a thing as lying by omission. The intent is clearly there to leave the hearer with the impression that the weapons programmes were active, which the speakers had no reason to believe, and every reason not to believe, from Kamel's statements.
All this is documented and footnoted at the link..