War justifications relied on informants that the CIA had already dismissed as liars.

[May 19, 2004] War justifications relied on informants that the CIA had already dismissed as liars.

See [http://www.freep.com/news/nw/snitch18_20040518.htm; Detroit Free Press; May 18, 2004] The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he had worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the CIA-operated Iraq Survey Group, charged with tracing any illegal weapons held by ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials said....

The informant in question gets prime billing in "A Decade of Deception and Defiance", a report issued on September 12, 2002 in support of President Bush's highly defiant and inflamatory speech to the United Nations on that day (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/iraqdecade.pdf).

The report in turn refers to another report, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment, by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. (http://www.iiss.org/news-more.php?itemID=88) This second report is an independant review of Iraq's capabilities, and some portions of the report were used in the justifications that ultimately led to the war. Note that the phrases were apparently cherry-picked from the report, since the report for example says things about the nuclear capability (e.g. that they had none) which the Administration did not say (e.g. their claim was to point at Iraq's imminent nuclear capability).