It was obvious to anybody who cared, before the invasion, that there were no WMDs. Hans Blix inspected every place suspected, and reported not only nothing, but not even a trace of anything, in the daily newspapers.<p>I suspect Maddox was misled, like Powell, by relying only on classified material that amounted to summaries produced with deliberate bias.<p>It is a fundamental problem: there is a thousand times as much classified material as you can afford to read. Who can justify reading outside it, where the writer might not have access to the whole story? But because there is so much, you are obliged to rely on summaries, and the sound judgment and the scruples of those in charge of what goes into them.