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A Legacy of Lies
It was a devastating blow to the White House. David Kay, the man hand-picked by the Bush administration to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, confirmed to a Senate committee in late January that the intelligence supporting Washington's case for war against Saddam Hussein was baseless.

"It turns out we were all wrong… and that is most disturbing," Kay declared.

But who exactly got it wrong? Intelligence agencies obviously exaggerated Iraq's WMD potential, and it's well known that they were egged on by their political masters in the Bush administration. But that's not the whole story. In fact, Bush's manipulation of Iraq intelligence was built on a foundation established during the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was in the White House. ...

...In other words, the defector who had been cited time after time, over eight years, by two presidents and their cabinets, as the source that proved Saddam was still hiding a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons -- that defector had actually said the opposite: Not only did the weapons not exist, they had been destroyed before Clinton was even elected.

Take, for example, the "5,000 gallons of botulinum. 2,000 gallons of anthrax, 25 biological-filled Scud warheads and 157 aerial bombs" -- the weapons Bill Clinton had listed in 1998. Or consider the "26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one and a half tons of nerve agent VX, 6,500 aerial chemical bombs" -- the weapons rattled off by Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer as the U.N. was inspecting Iraq in 2003.

"We don't know where those [weapons] are," Fleischer claimed. "We have yet to see any accounting for all of these." In fact, it was these very stockpiles that Kamel attested had been destroyed in 1991.

There is now little doubt that Kamel was telling the truth. The strongest evidence -- evidence so unimpeachable it invites the word "proof" -- came in the form of a captured Iraqi document obtained in January by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. The memo was composed five days after Kamel's defection, on August 13, 1995, and its author was Hossam Amin, Iraq's chief liaison to the U.N. inspectors. It was addressed to Qusay Hussein, Saddam's son.

The letter was a piece of damage assessment. Kamel was expected to blow all Iraq's cover stories to the inspectors, and the regime needed to prepare itself for the fallout. So Amin proceeded to lay out for his boss, in minute detail, two separate storylines: The version Iraq had told the inspectors about each weapons program, and what the truth was. (Or, as the memo itself put it: "the matters that are known to the traitor and not declared" to the U.N.)

Among the memo's statements of fact was that "destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of 1991" In a comprehensive evaluation of the evidence, Gellman stood Kamel's 1995 briefing to the U.N. against the real story laid out in Amin's memo. The comparison, he concluded, "suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out."

Iraq had eliminated all its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991, and the U.S. had been told of it in 1995. ...