It was the reason America and Britain used to go to war in Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction. The CIA have finally declassified documents that show how the intelligence agency were bamboozled into believing Saddam Hussein had any.

TIME.com reports how the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) “ferrets over at the National Security Archive (NSA) got their hands on the “CIA’s equivalent of the dog-ate-my-homework”. The NSA applied to have the document in 2006, and have only just received it.

Essentially what happened was that because Saddam had lied about possessing WMDs in the past, the CIA believed he still was. Basically the advanced ‘once a liar always a liar’ technique.

Quite the blunder, as the US went to war predominantly on this false intelligence. Blunder is possibly too weak a word; as TIME.com says, “[f]our thousand, four hundred and eight-six U.S. troops, 318 allies and untold thousands of Iraqis died in the ensuing conflict.”

Much of the document has been redacted, but this is what was left and it paints a pretty clear picture. These are the statements that stand out:

— When the [U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency] inspections proved more intrusive than expected, the Iraqi leadership appears to have panicked and made a fateful decision to secretly destroy much of the remaining nondeclared items and eliminate the evidence.

— Clumsy but genuine Iraqi moves toward transparency — significant alterations in their “cheat and retreat” pattern — not only went undetected but instead seemed to confirm that Iraq could and would conceal evidence of proscribed programs.

— We now judge that the Iraqis feared that [Saddam’s son-in-law and Iraqi weapons expert Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid] — a critical figure in Iraq’s WMD and [denial and deception] activities — would reveal additional undisclosed information. Iraq decided that further widespread deception and attempts to hold onto extensive WMD programs while under U.N. sanctions was untenable and changed strategic direction by adopting a policy of disclosure and improved cooperation.

— Iraq’s firmly established “cheat and retreat” pattern made it difficult for U.N. inspectors and Western analysts to accept new Iraqi assertions at face value.

— A liability of intelligence analysis is that once a party has been proven to be an effective deceiver, that knowledge becomes a heavy factor in the calculation of the analytical observer.

Tom Blanton, director of the nonprofit NSA, called the document a “remarkable CIA mea culpa.” It really isn’t often you hear the CIA saying, “yup, we screwed that one up.”

You can read the full document here.

[Source: TIME]