Former UN inspector Bernd Birkicht said he believed the CIA had made up intelligence on WMD to provide a legal basis for the war. Supposedly top-secret, high-quality intelligence had led the inspectors on an absurd wild goose chase, he complained.
"We received information about a site, giving the exact geographical co-ordinates, and when we got there we found nothing," said Mr Birkicht. "Nothing on the ground. Nothing under the ground. Just desert." He added that a "decontamination truck" in satellite photographs presented by Mr Powell to the Security Council was a fire engine.
Cees Wiebes, a leading Dutch expert who spoke to senior intelligence officials on both sides of the Atlantic before the war, said many of them told him the WMD evidence was "very, very poor". Even worse damage was done by the publication last week of parts of a classified report in September by the Defence Intelligence Agency in the US, which said there was "no reliable evidence" to prove that Saddam Hussein had developed chemical weapons.
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