I'd seen this article earlier today but wasn't able to comment:

Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.

The goal, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We're reinterviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S."

I heard it remarked this afternoon that this may have been a strategic leak by the CIA, an agency traditionally hostile to Iraq's democratization potential, resistance groups' reliability, weapons program breadth and terrorist ties. Furthermore, the first sentence posits "failure" to find weapons and corresponding institutions as irrefutable fact, despite growing murmurs of a watershed to come.

That aside, the idea is equally flimsy: why in the world would Saddam Hussein not only risk his regime but practically ensure its destruction by luring America into a decisive attack? It's as unlikely as Al Capone seeding the FBI with proof of tax evasion so he could die peacefully in prison instead of hanging for an eventual murder rap. Criminals favor the easiest methods to escape from suspicion. If Saddam wanted to use defectors as decoys, their story would have been precisely the opposite: that Ba'athist Iraq was clean.