So President Bush will now back the creation of a commission to investigate intelligence failures preceding the Iraq war. But look closely and you’ll find that the administration’s game-plan is an astonishingly Machiavellian exercise.
Before the war, Bush’s Iraq hawks, dissatisfied with the weasely intel they were receiving suggesting that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, browbeat the CIA and zeroed in on a passel of dubious reports that indicated the dictator in fact possessed weapons of mass destruction. All indications suggest that the intelligence agency’s best people looked on in horror as their procedures for vetting and verifying information were ignored by the war-or-bust crowd, and impossible-to-verify accounts were touted as gospel. (Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker pieces on “stovepiping” provide the most thorough background here.)
With the WMD having failed to turn up, Bush and his men now have the gall to turn on the CIA and say, “Well, maybe we do have a problem here. We were misled by bad intelligence before the war. Better start an investigation into why our intelligence services screwed up so badly.”
If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it. Any investigation that fails to have a full mandate to explore not only the failure to collect intelligence properly at the C.I.A., but the failure to make appropriate use of it at the White House, is castrated from the starting line.
For more good detail, Josh Marshall is blogging up a storm.
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