I don't know, why did the Spanish inquisitors do it? probably because they enjoy torturing people and it gives them plausible deniability when the **** hits the fan,- the Iraq al-Qaida connection was not used as an official pretext to go to war but somehow about 70% of Americans believed there was a connection which contributed to support for the war and as late as 2006 50% of Americans still believed it. I'm always surprised they just didn't plant WMD but **** like that gets complicated and there are a lot of sharp people out there who are still fundamentally honest, lots of sociopaths at top, not so much at the working level. WMD were a good guess, we knew they had a nuclear weapons program at one time and hell we helped Iraq to integrate chemical weapons into their US-provided battle plans while fighting Iran between 1985-1988. Iraq was getting help for it's chemical and biological weapons programs from the U.S., Germany, Britain, France and Russia right up to the First Gulf war, who would've thunk that tricky bastard Saddam would actually really comply with demands to get rid of his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, kinda gave us a little bit of a screwing there. In the end it didn't really matter much we just emphasized that we gave the Iraqis freedom from a tyrant- who knows maybe there is an alien liberation force hovering above us as I type ready to save us from the Obama tyrant and if they have to kill 15 million of us and displace another 60 million, destroy our infrastructure, and disperse spent uranium over wide swaths to do it, well I'm informed it's a bargain and we should be grateful.