The apparent suicide of British government scientist David Kelly, however, might turn out to be of more significance for future military adventures. Kelly was almost certainly the main off-the-record source for a BBC reporter who wrote in May that the Blair government had "sexed up" a dossier on Saddam's banned weapons by claiming, apparently inaccurately, that they could be deployed within 45 minutes. Publicly entering the world of political hype and spin - he was grilled by a parliamentary committee and his picture splashed all over the telly and newspapers - was apparently too much for the mild-mannered scientist.

That apparent dubious use of intelligence to hype the case for going to war with Saddam Hussein's regime turns out to be only one of numerous instances of fudging the intelligence, on both sides of the Atlantic. We have all heard the putatively cynical maxim, "In war, the first casualty is truth." But the propaganda run-up to this war featured so many exaggerations that it is not unreasonable to suspect that all the claims - except the one that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator whose ousting would on balance benefit the Iraqi people - were untrue to a significant degree.

And despite the truth of Saddam's brutality, evidence also continues to mount that the United States has not been greeted as a welcome liberator in Iraq. The death toll for U.S. military personnel continues to rise, even though, as Editor & Publisher has reported, most U.S. media underplay the death toll seriously. Even as it is becoming clear that occupying Iraq is turning out to be more difficult than originally envisioned, and as the vaunted "weapons of mass destruction" haven't showed up, prickly questions about the quality of the intelligence on which U.S. officials are said to have relied are becoming more urgent.

Did the administration really have good evidence of weapons or anything resembling an imminent threat from Iraq? Did the administration encourage intelligence operatives to "cook the books" to make the case for war more plausible? Was there a pattern of choosing to believe shaky information so long as it tended to support the already-decided proposition that Saddam Hussein needed to be taken out?

The answers, tentatively, appear to be no, yes, and yes.

The most publicized issue involves the "yellowcake" (a low grade of uranium) that Iraq was supposed to be trying to purchase from Niger in Africa. In his State of the Union address, President Bush uttered those 16 fateful words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

That claim has been shown to have been based on forged documents, indeed on what some CIA analysts viewed as crude forgeries (one letter had the wrong name for the foreign minister of Niger). The documents had been around since last fall, and CIA Director George Tenet had urged the president, successfully, to delete a reference to Saddam's alleged African shopping trip from an Oct. 7 speech. Now Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, has fallen on his sword (but not resigned), taking what passes for responsibility in Babylon-on-the-Potomac for the "mistake."

But the use of shaky or discredited intelligence appears to be part of a pattern of exaggerating the threat to bolster support for attacking Iraq.

The most extensive treatment of the pattern appeared in a May 5 New Yorker piece by veteran investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh. In it, Hersh detailed the formation of an Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, conceived by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and headed by longtime colleague Abram Shulsky. The OSP operated as a "Team B," with access to raw data from existing intelligence agencies and a mandate to interpret it in its own way. It also tended to give credit to information from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency regarded as extremely unreliable.

Special Plans tended to treat the most alarming reports about weapons and links to terrorist groups as reliable, and before long the president, vice president and other administration officials were using OSP assessments in preference to the more cautious assessments from the CIA and DIA. A former intelligence official told Hersh: "One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn't like the intelligence they were getting, so they brought in people to write the stuff."

John Judis and Spencer Ackerman, in a piece for the June 30 issue of the New Republic (which supported the war enthusiastically), wrote about the Office of Special Plans, the yellowcake controversy and several other exaggerations the administration used to justify the war.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's stirring speech July 17 before a joint session of Congress, defending the war whether WMDs are found or not, was upstaged almost immediately by news that the body of David Kelly, a former U.N. weapons inspector, was found the next day in the woods about five miles from his home. The inquiry into his apparent suicide could lead to the resignations of senior officials in the British government, the BBC, or both. That could make any future British government leery of supporting future U.S. plans for overseas regime changes.

Then there's the question of whether Saddam's regime had real links (beyond a possible occasional meeting with no real follow-up) to the al-Qaida terrorist network. Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Steven Simon of the Rand Corp. (hardly havens for raving pacifists), authors of the book "The Age of Sacred Terror," just wrote a piece in which they noted that "in the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between Iraq and al-Qaida," despite the fact that "uncovering such a link should be much easier than finding weapons of mass destruction."

The Bush administration would hardly be the first in history to fudge information to bolster the case for a policy it had decided to pursue, especially a policy of war. But it is becoming apparent that the exaggeration was so pervasive as to raise serious questions if it moves significantly toward trying to take out other regimes by military force.