>Everyone paying even little attention to anything other than US propaganda knew it, among other times, when the US “evidence” was debunked by UN inspectors in the same hearing it was presented. Which the major broadcast media all transmitted live, so if they were watching their own coverage they knew it, too.
I think that's a convenient story that sounds great in hindsight, but I don't see evidence that that's what actually happened at the time. Yes, the Chief Inspector tried to dispute some of Powell's claims, but this was not necessarily considered a "debunking".
There was a great deal of confusion, uncertainty, and disagreement, including among the UN inspectors themselves. It wasn't black and white. You can't point to any sort of convincing proof, pre-invasion, that Iraq did not have WMDs.
Of course, one shouldn't have to prove a negative, and one should have very damning proof if they're going to start a war, but the point is that a lot of smart people did think there was a legitimate risk. They were just wrong, and in some cases were misled.
The media should have been much more balanced and cautious with their reporting, for sure, but the suggestion that all the media outlets just intentionally lied to everyone about WMDs is very unrealistic. There certainly may have been lying going on inside the intelligence community and perhaps the executive branch, but that's not the same.
I do think a big takeaway from the Iraq War and some of the Trump stuff is that the mainstream and historically respected media (NYT etc.) are much less trustworthy than we all initially thought. But they're less trustworthy because they're fallible humans who often succumb to biases and overconfidence in their analyses - not because they're deceitful evildoers.
>We (those of us who had been paying any attention, at any rate) also knew that much of the senior national security leadership of the US administration that was pretending to be concerned about that had, in fact, actively, vehemently, and overtly supported those actions at the time
I'm with you there.