Using a tube of detergent as evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the US launched the Iraq War that killed 250,000 civilians in the Gulf country.

It was even worse than that. The Lancet article, the highest-quality death toll measurement, found over 650,000 deaths by 2007 alone. Physicians for Social Responsibility reached a conservative estimate of one million by the end of the war.

And the evidence against Iraq was fabricated through torture, not just detergent. From Colin Powell’s aide Lawrence Wilkerson:

[W]hat I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002—well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion—its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.