How? By hacking into the CIA, or by doing an exhaustive search of Iraq all by their own without Saddam Hussein noticing?
It might be more accurate to say...
"...by attending a UNMOVIC or IAEA press briefing, or reading a press release".
"...by speaking to the same sources who were leaking information and whistleblowing before the war even started".
"...by speaking to actual international relations, international political economy, and regional political experts, as opposed to political operatives masquerading as foreign policy experts".
"...by
not deplatforming and blacklisting aforementioned individuals -- internationally-recognized weapons manufacture and inspection experts, and foreign policy experts alike -- for expressing entirely justified criticism of the war and its rationale".
"...by performing basic due diligence, regarding unsubstantiated claims of people long-proven to be untrustworthy and unreliable -- some of whose lack of credibility had been established as early as Vietnam -- with well-earned skepticism".
Oh, and I forgot one:
"...by not actively working for seven years to reframe, and eventually discredit, testimony and delivered documents from Iraqi defectors that Iraq had in fact ended its WMD programs and destroyed its stockpiles".
I must be slipping, that I'd forgotten Hussein Kamel until now. The, uh, let me just check my notes here...defector who apparently hoped to gain US support for a coup to install him, while simultaneously being an Iraqi double agent feeding the West misinformation about Iraq's WMD program. But despite this strange quantum superposition of political states, he was honor killed within 72 hours of returning to Iraq.
Whose testimony was simultaneously trustworthy because he admitted Iraq had a WMD program (which UNSCOM already knew), but untrustworthy because he admitted its stockpiles were destroyed (which UNSCOM already knew). That testimony, which was simultaneously a game-changer because it was a cooperative insider source on Iraq's WMD (which UNSCOM already knew, and the US sure as shit already knew as the US
aided Iraq's WMD program prior to Desert Shield), but of limited value because he didn't provide proof of the existence of Iraq's secret weapons he said didn't exist. The testimony that was regarded by the US and UNSCOM to be so highly sensitive in hopes of bluffing Iraq, that he was doing interviews on CNN.
But, of course, I'm not talking about events from 2003. Nor 2004, 2005, 2006...no, I'm talking about events from
1995.
Not that it would stop the man's defection and testimony from being distorted and used by the Bush administration and the press to continue the big lie:
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who...
fair.org
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss must have been in charge of CNN and a bunch of other news outlets in 2003, for the politico-media complex to have "kinda forgotten" on that scale about what they'd covered on their own outlets seven years prior about this precise subject.