ABSTRACT
Introduction The absence of any evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ongoing WMD programmes in Iraq following the US-led invasion in March 2003 resulted in a number of government commissions and inquiries in the United States and the UK, and independent analysis in books and journals on the material presented by the Bush administration to justify the war. Evidence that has emerged since the war suggests that two important processes were at work. First, the US intelligence community operated on a number of false assumptions about Iraq’s WMD programmes, leading to inaccurate analysis. Second, the Bush administration, particularly the senior leadership in the Defense Department, augmented the federal government’s usual intelligence-gathering and analysis procedures. This was done for the specific purpose of finding evidence to support the administration’s contention that a working relationship existed between Iraq and al-Qaida and that Iraq had active chemical, biological and especially nuclear weapons programmes, however ambiguous the evidence might be.
