Intelligence and the lack thereof

An important read, from Jim Lobe at Foreign Policy in Focus:

Credibility Gap over Iraq WMD Looms Larger

Retired intelligence officials from both the CIA and the DIA are also coming out with ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to justify war. They say both agencies were intimidated by the political pressure exerted in particular by neoconservative hawks under Cheney and Rumsfeld, who even established a special unit in the defense secretary's office to determine what intelligence was "missing."

Much of the evidence on which the WMD case was based came from defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed by the neoconservatives--including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey--for more than a decade.

The disturbing aspect of this is that this lousy, agenda-driven intelligence also formed the basis for the administration's current strategy for rebuilding Iraq, which as you may have noticed is not exactly going according to plan.

[Also worth reading from the FPIF site: The U.S. and Post-War Iraq: An Analysis, by Stephen Zunes.]