Jake, have you read the declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, dated Oct 02? The Intelligence Community stated with high confidence--that's their highest level of certainty--that Iraq possessed chem and bio weapons. No one had to "doctor" that intelligence; it was the same information Clinton had when he was in office. (In fact, in a moment of candor that embarrassed other leading Dems, after the invasion he admitted to being surprised that we did not find WMD's.)

Post-9/11, if I'd been the guy in charge, I would've needed pretty strong intelligence that those WMD's--which Saddam used in the past--were no longer in his hands, in view of the fact that he had a history of supporting terrorists.

About a year after the invasion, in a speech at Georgetown, CIA Director George Tenet said, in reference to the WMD issue: "Based on an assessment of the data we collected over the past 10 years, it would have been difficult for analysts to come to any different conclusions than the ones reached in October of 2002."

Without the WMD intelligence, IMO it would have been highly unlikely that Congress would have supported the invasion of Iraq. But with that degree of certainty from the intel community--and an NIE represents the IC's "most authoritative judgments" on such issues--it was unnecessary to "mislead" anyone in the runup to the war. And remember, Congress had the classified version of the NIE in their hot little hands when they voted on giving W war powers.

The "misleading" crap comes from people who are hard-core Bush-haters. Every major intel service in the world agreed with us that Saddam had WMD's. There was no stream of reporting that showed Saddam had destroyed his WMD stockpile. Thus, there was no significant intelligence to ignore, concerning the major reason for launching the invasion.