Senate Intelligence Report: Errors, Lies, Exaggerations

I was about to post about the Newsweek take on this matter (called "The Dots Never Existed") related to the CIA's intelligence and the Bush-Cheney push to war when I found that Lambert of Corrente summed it up so nicely:

Somehow—could it be that it's an election year?—the Republican Senate Intelligence committee released a report on the flawed intelligence the administration used to sell the Iraq war without mentioning that Bush didn't care whether the intelligence was flawed or not, as long it supported the conclusion he wanted. Michael Isikoff takes a more fair and balanced approach:

[There are] many wince-inducing moments to be found in the 500-page Senate report, which lays out how the U.S. intelligence community utterly failed to accurately assess the state of Saddam Hussein's programs for weapons of mass destruction—and how White House and Pentagon officials, intent on taking the country to war, unquestioningly embraced the flawed conclusions.

Taken together, the facts in the report show that virtually every major claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq—from Saddam's growing nuclear program to his close ties with Al Qaeda—was either wrong or exaggerated.
(via Newsweek)

When even a whore like Isikoff—so instrumental in the slow-moving, media-fuelled Repubublican coup against Clinton—isn't buying, you know the administration is in "deep doo doo."

The report did offer the administration one consolation: the investigators said they found no overt evidence that intelligence-community officials were directly pressured to distort their findings.

Except, as usual, as soon as you look at the detail, the Bush cover story falls apart:

Some U.S. intelligence analysts complained to the CIA ombudsman that "the constant questions and requests to reexamine the issue of Iraq's links to terrorism [were] unreasonable and took away from their valuable analytic time." When the CIA reached a measured and ambiguous view of the connection—"Iraq and Al-Qaeda: Interpreting a Murky Relationship" was the title of one June 2002 report—a team of Pentagon hard-liners under the direction of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith strongly challenged the agency's conclusions. An August 2002 briefing that the Pentagon team gave to the then CIA Director George Tenet pushed evidence that Iraq might have been involved in the 9/11 attack. Their prime piece of evidence: alleged meetings in Prague between lead hijacker Muhammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. In fact, the committee found that the meetings likely never occurred.

I wonder if Dick "Dick" Cheney keeps pushing the Atta "connection" because that one would be the easiest to fake, as a little surprise?