by Jacob Weisberg

Slate

04/05/05

The report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction is a government document well worth reading. With impressive precision, the commission shows how massive ineptitude at every spy agency fostered the Bush administration's mistaken assessment of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical capabilities. The report undermines the popular notion that Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress was responsible for feeding all the crappy intelligence to the White House. As it happens, blinkered and uncommunicative bureaucrats at the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and elsewhere were fully capable of delivering junk intelligence without any outside help. ... On one central point, however, the report is utterly, laughably, embarrassingly unpersuasive: that our world-altering intelligence screw-up was not the result of political pressure from the White House...

http://www.slate.com/id/2116260/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp