Focusing on the wrong thing:

Ladies and gentlemen, keep your eyes on the unclassified report. Ignore the one the Bush administration had access to. Now go back to whatever you were doing.

In the Los Angeles Times we read: (emphasis added)

In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.

But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.

So, the decision makers at the White House were aware of the CIA's reservations.

Initially, we wondered why the report was issued on a Friday, a day when news tends to get lost over the weekend, because it seemed to totally vindicate Bush. But now it's apparent that the report, dispite Pat Roberts best effort, does contain damning information about what the White House knew.


posted by Quiddity at 7/10/2004 04:13:00 PM