[Overpaid Slacker]

Oh. Great. This canard again.
Bush's statement in the State of the Union address was that "The dictator of Iraq is not disarming; to the contrary, he is deceiving." The ISG report (which had access to much more than the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which in a mind-bending stretch of bullshyte CNN calls "nonpartisan") tells a different story from the CEIP soundbite: "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."
[aside: Quick quiz -- how "large" a "stockpile" of Sarin or botulism (in cubic space) would I need to kill, say the entire population of Chicago?]

The ISG team (including several former UN inspectors) found that Iraqi officials had engaged in "deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs" before, during and after the war.
The ISG reported that it found proof that WMD suplies and facilities had been concealed from UN inspectors, including "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses . . . that contained equipment . . . suitable for continuing" chemical and biological warfare research. It found "a prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials . . . were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN. ISG inspectors received from an Iraqi scientist a "vial of live C. botulinum Okra B" -- a precursor of botulism toxin, perhaps the deadliest toxin known.
The report quoted an Iraqi chemical weapons official who reported that the Iraqi facilities could have produced weaponized mustard gas in two months and Sarin within 24 months, and that only the US movement against Saddam had dismantled missiles with ranges of up to 600 miles -- much more than the 90-mile range Iraq was allowed.
The ISG's bottom line -- "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.
Strangely, when the ISG's findings were reported to us in October of '03, they were related as the Kay report (the head of the Iraq Survey Group). In an inexplicable bit of selective reporting, Tom Brokaw relayed none of the foregoing from the ISG report, but the following: "the man in charge of finding those weapons in Iraq, David Kay, went before Congress and said so far he has come up dry: no weapons, no mobile labs, no nuclear weapons or even an advanced program." OK, there's lying involved (as in deliberate mischaracterization of what you know/believe to be the truth) but it's not W.

Tabs' black helicopters aside, it's fairly settled that the intelligence communities of the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, et al. believed that Saddam had WMD. Was each and every one of these intelligence agencies deceived by the reports coming out of Iraq (the scientists that perhaps were lying to Saddam, telling him weapons programs were further along than they were?) perhaps. But it's plain that even those agencies beyond the reach of Hitler/Bush believed Saddam had WMDs or the capacity to make them in short order.

The use of this belief as a "selling point" for the war is no more nefarious than using the other beliefs -- he'd gassed his own people, hadn't lived up to numerous other UN resolutions, supported terrorism, etc.

No time to edit right now, so forgive spelling/grammar errors.
JP