Faithful readers of my posts here will recognize, perhaps with some satisfaction, familiar themes in this paragraph from the current Newsweek.

Remember the aluminum tubes presented as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program? It's now clear that the real experts in the United States' own nuclear-weapons program, at the Energy Department, fiercely challenged the CIA's assessment that the tubes were designed to build centrifuges. Remember the Iraqi drone aircraft that Colin Powell told the United Nations could be used to deliver bioweapons agents? When previously classified chunks of the NIE were released in July 2003, it was revealed that experts in Air Force intelligence regarded the idea of mini-UAVs' dispensing bioagents as nonsense. Remember the mobile bioweapons labs, which Vice President Dick Cheney cited yet again just two weeks ago as evidence of Saddam's WMD program? It seems they were made to generate hydrogen for weather balloons. Kay has called a CIA report endorsing the bio-weapons theory "premature and embarrassing." (The CIA still stands by the report.)

What Went Wrong?&#160&#160

Givin the fact that there have been numerous attempts on this board to impugn my credibility, the record will show that the above paragraph echos the very points I have made repeatedly, including most recently:

Nevertheless, no matter how you cut into this whole sorry mess, the record clearly shows that during the rush to war, lurking in the small print and on the back pages, credible voices were telling a different story: The Niger yellowcake caper, the hyped claims for the aluminum tubes, the "drones", and all the rest of the breathless scare stories were dismissed by the Bush administration's own experts.

It's Still Baloney

Now if you're an intelligence analyst, you cannot cherry pick those facts which support your estimation and ignore those which refute it. The Congressional committee investigating the so-called "intelligence failures" found that our "...CIA analysts relied too heavily on outdated, circumstantial intelligence and on information from unreliable informants."

Now stop and ponder that for a second. On the one hand, we have experts and specialists refuting all of the major claims about the various threats alleged for Iraq, while on the other, we have CIA analysts relying on unreliable hearsay and old, circumstantial evidence to reach the conclusions used by Pres. Bush to support his case for war on Iraq.

As I've noted elsewhere It Does Not Compute

No, the case for war with Iraq was not based on intelligence failures, but on a coordinated effort to dupe the public into support for the war.

I wish I could say that's the worst of it, but it isn't.
S