Now if you're an intelligence analyst, you cannot cherry pick those facts which support your estimation and ignore those which refute it.

True enough. Unfortunately for you, this also applies to your point of view, and that of Newsweek, which couldn't be more partisan if it was being paid by the DNC.

Simply because someone dissented on an intelligence point is not proof that this point was false.

The intelligence estimates before the war were done on a consensus basis, and the judgment call was made.

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.

The DOE dissenting statement on the aluminum tubes:

"DOE agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the [aluminum] tubes probably are not part of the program."

Newsweek categorizes this as "fiercely challenged."

Oddly, I have yet to see the first part of the DOE statement in publications like Newsweek. Or do we just "cherry pick" which part of the DOE opinions we want to look at?

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.

From the "Declassified and Released Excerpts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq," 25 July 2003:

The Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, US Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability.

Again oddly, the word "nonsense" seems to appear nowhere in this statement. And in fact, the conclusion in general does not seem as firm as Newsweek portrays it.

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.)

I have beaten this one to death here, including evidence that the trailers were not the Marconi artillery equipment shipped from Britain, but it doesn't seem to do much good.

David Kay's conclusions from October:

We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW production effort. Investigation into the origin of and intended use for the two trailers found in northern Iraq in April has yielded a number of explanations, including hydrogen, missile propellant, and BW production, but technical limitations would prevent any of these processes from being ideally suited to these trailers. That said, nothing we have discovered rules out their potential use in BW production.

I have shown that if the examiners cannot decide if this apparatus is for either making hydrogen, or for making missile propellants, or for BW production, then one cannot come to ANY positive conclusion about what these trailers are for. Yet the positive conclusion that they cannot possibly be for BW has been frozen in stone in the antiwar literature.

Going even further, Newsweek has decided that they can arbitrarily conclude they are hydrogen generators. Period. Frankly, I'm getting sick to death of having vague statements suddenly "hardened" into conclusions by the press. This "statement drift" is constant and unrelenting. Thank God we no longer have to rely on the media as the arbiter of truth, and have easy access to original materials. Newsweek, of course, hopes no one will go to the kind of trouble I do.

And I listened to Kay's testimony. He did not stammer.

Newsweek has written a partisan hack job, and this was just the one paragraph you quoted. It's hard to stay ahead of the lies and misrepresentation. It's so easy to come out with the false quotes and distortions, especially when all you have to do is glean them from the mainstream media, and not easy to beat them back. But I suppose somebody has to do it, or the lies are all anyone hears.