THIS SEEMS LIKE A BLOW TO THE “BUSH LIED” CROWD:

Former US president Bill Clinton said in October during a visit to Portugal that he was convinced Iraq had weapons of mass destruction up until the fall of Saddam Hussein, Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said.

“When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime,” he said in an interview with Portuguese cable news channel SIC Noticias.

This is consistent with the other Clinton statements on the subject, of course, going back to 1998. And this doesn’t answer the “where are they?” question. (Syria? Lebanon? Vaporware by Saddam’s scientists?) But this does blow the popular Bush-made-it-up theory, and it suggests that if there’s an intelligence failure here (certainly possible — the CIA famously blew the collapse of the Soviet Union, after all), it didn’t originate with the Bush Administration