http://tinyurl.com/2me3y (NY Times
"I think they had a set mind," Mr. Blix said on NBC's "Today" show as he began a 10-day American book tour in the week marking the first year anniversary of the United States-led invasion.
"They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons," he said. "Like the former days of the witch hunt, they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black cat, well, that's evidence of the witch."
Speaking more assertively about the war than he does in "Disarming Iraq", his new book, Mr. Blix charged the Administration with invading Iraq as retaliation for the terror strikes on the United States, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attackers.
"So in a way, you could say that Iraq was perhaps as much punitive as it was preemptive," he said "It was a reaction to 9/11 that we have to strike some theoretical, hypothetical links between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists. That was wrong. There wasn't anything."
Mr. Blix said that the Americans and British depended too much on defectors and exercised too little critical judgment in assessing their information. "The CIA certainly is very used to debriefing defectors, so they must have had a critical mind," he said, "but they also knew what they wanted to hear at the top."
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