Dr. Kelly was under pressure from Prime Minister Tony Blair's government after he accused government officials of exaggerating intelligence pointing to Saddam Hussein's possession of unconventional weapons.
A similar process of cherry-picking, of choosing and exaggerating intelligence that suited the administration's preconceptions, unfolded over the issue of W.M.D.'s before the war.
The former UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, weighed into the controversy over weapons of mass destruction yesterday when he accused Tony Blair and George Bush of behaving like insincere salesmen who "exaggerated" intelligence in an attempt to win support for war.
Administration critics have accused the president and his advisers of exaggerating intelligence reports, cherry-picking data that was most helpful to their war strategy and pressuring analysts to view Iraq as an imminent threat.
Did Downing Street exaggerate the intelligence available at the time?
But in his appearances, Mr. McLaughlin demurred when asked whether the White House had exaggerated the intelligence.
They are the "sexing up" of the case for war before the invasion, most notoriously by exaggerating what intelligence services knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and the mismanagement of the occupation afterwards.
He had killed himself after being named as the source of a BBC report which accused Mr Blair's government of knowingly exaggerating the intelligence case for invading Iraq.The Hutton inquiry exonerated the government and castigated the BBC and was roundly criticised as a result.
In an Op-Ed article days earlier in The New York Times, the former ambassador said his 2002 trip to Niger found nothing to substantiate the accusation that Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore yellowcake in Niger and that the Bush administration had exaggerated the intelligence as it ramped up for war with Iraq.
Blix pointed out that even the US parallel dossier was more cautious on Iraq's alleged chemical and biological weapons than Blair and Straw's version, which we since learned, "exaggerated what intelligence knew – dropped caveats, presented as facts what were uncertain conjectures".
