Dubya is striking a committee to ask the $64 billion dollar question: how could the intelligence on Iraq's WMD been so out of whack? Quick answer: it wasn't, but the summaries that got to the President might have been.
Just a quick glance through the revmod archives shows me that as early as February 10 of last year, well before the war started, the most in-depth report I could find in the public domain suggested that Iraq had little more than some canisters of expired mustard gas.
I've been reading Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary. It's great reading. Here, from page 161:
O'Neill had reviewed a pile of CIA intelligence dossiers prior to this meeting [taking place May 16, 2001 - Don]. "Everything Tenet sent up to Bush and Cheney about Iraq was very judicious and precisely qualified. The President was clearly very interested in weapons or weapons programs - and frustrated about our weak intelligence capability - but Tenet was clearly being careful to say here's the little we know and the great deal that we don't. That wouldn't change," O'Neill recalled, "and I read those CIA reports for two years." [Emphasis Suskind's]There you have it. The only people talking up Iraqi weapons programs were the PNAC types who have been looking around for something to bomb. The CIA didn't believe there was a need for a war, and elsewhere in the book it's made pretty clear that State wasn't particlarly keen either.
Mr. President, don't set up a commission - call Rove and Wolfowitz into the Oval Office and start taking names.
Anyway, the doubts of the American people are are rising. Check out the Lou Dobbs poll for the evening. "Do you believe a commission assembled by President Bush to review prewar intelligence on Iraq can be truly independent?" At 4:40 mst, it was showing 97% "no".
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