Iraq war leaders presented fabricated intelligence as certain evidence

Evidence

The erroneous claim that Saddam was allied with al Qaeda and suggestions that he had a hand in the September 11 terrorist attacks added urgency to calls for immediate military intervention to destroy his lethal weapons and dismantle his nuclear capabilities. In a forceful speech to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented richly documented proof, including aerial photographs and even a vial that could have been used for anthrax, that Saddam possessed lethal weapons and was building a nuclear bomb. Much to Powell’s later chagrin, his entire case was founded on faulty intelligence (Jehl & Sanger, 2004). The British prime minister, Tony Blair, who was bent on ousting Saddam for “regime change,” later asserted that the evidence then available that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction was “beyond doubt” (Smith, 2005). His certainty was based on a “sexed-up” dossier rife with disputable and faulty information (MacAskill & Norton-Taylor, 2003). On the U.S. side, CIA director George Tenet confidently reported, in an athletic metaphor that became his legacy, that the case against Saddam was a “slam-dunk” (Leibovich, 2004). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2313

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on manufactured consent and intelligence politicization leading up to the Iraq invasion.