i really gotta wonder what was going thru former secretary of state colin powell's head last week when the commission on the intelligence capabilities of the united states regarding weapons of mass destruction delivered its report.  

whether you'll admit it or not, those of you who put your faith in every claim--from anthrax-laden drones to aluminum centrifuge tubes to mobile bioweapons labs--uttered by bush, rumsfeld, cheney, rice, etc  regarding saddam hussein's arsenal of WMDs must be somewhat chagrinned by the content of that report.  as it turns out,  hans blix and his un inspectors were presenting accurate facts while the bushites were selling wolf tickets.  it's understandable why you, the report's authors and the whitehouse might want now to claim: 'we weren't wrong, it was those damn intelligence morons who led us astray.

coming from the white house, it's a ludicrous excuse, lame past the point of insult.  those dumb  intelligence people work for bush which makes him 'smarter' than them.  while it may be somewhat disingenuous of me to expect more from this president than i believe he can deliver,  he had cheney and rumsfeld there to help out.  obsessed with their agenda, they failed him.  by allowing them to do so, he failed us.

unlike you or i, the war presidency had to know the source of its 'intelligence'  was, to say the very least, patently unreliable.  to say more, that source was a delusional alcoholic compulsive liar they code-named 'curveball'.

what makes me think they knew all that?   working backwards in time, consider the following:

a.  several weeks  prior to last year's presidential election, house intelligence committee chairman peter hoekstra (r-mich.) and ranking democrat member  jane harman (d-ca.) announced they'd sent a letter to cia director goss asking for a copy of a report prepared by the cia inspector general that had been completed in early summer of 2004 but never released. rep harman was quoted as saying,  "We believe that the CIA has been told not to distribute the report," because it would badly embarrass the administration and affect the election.

(i'll admit i had this one figured wrong because i had no idea there was a 'curveball' until just recently. silly me, i thought chalabi was the one making it up as they went along. compared to curveball, chalabi's merely another white collar criminal.)  

thanks to the report of the wmd committee, there's no longer much of a  mystery as to that report's subject.   only the naive or the true believer will deny the likelihood this report was deliberately and possibly illegally embargoed (another bush administration first) to spare bush from having to splain how it was 'hard work' finding someone who could fabricate all day and all nite...to custom specs no less. 

b.  actually the new report clears up another mystery for those who've wondered why george tenet was awarded the medal of freedom following his resignation (prompted by the 911 commission's less than enthusiastic review of his job performance). what was it that george did so ineptly but well it merited a medal?  my guess is: following orders--specifically orders to keep america in the dark about 'curveball' for as long as possible. 

c. then there's the matter of powell's speech to the un in which he presented photographs of locations and illustrations of mobile biolab trucks.  they weren't real but powell didn't know that because he wasn't told the source for all that bullshit was good ol curveball.

 the wmd intelligence report dances around the question of whether that omission was deliberate or accidental. 
 
 Preparations for the United Nations address culminated with Secretary Powell, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, and support staff going to New York City prior to the speech, which was to be delivered on February 5, 2003. 379 Until late in the night on February 4, Secretary Powell and Mr. Tenet continued to finalize aspects of the speech. 380
 
 According to the division chief, at about midnight on the night before the speech, he was called at home by Mr. Tenet. As the division chief recalls the conversation, Mr. Tenet asked whether the division chief had a contact number for another foreign intelligence service (not the service handling Curveball) so Mr. Tenet could get clearance to use information from a source of that service. 381 The division chief told the Commission that he took the opportunity to ask the DCI about the " [foreign service country] reporting" from the liaison service handling Curveball. Although he did not remember his exact words, the division chief says that he told Mr. Tenet something to the effect of "you know that the [foreign service] reporting has problems." 382 According to the division chief , Mr. Tenet replied with words to the effect of "yeah, yeah," and that he was "exhausted." 383 The division chief said that when he listened to the speech the next day, he was surprised that the information from Curveball had been included.
 
not 1/10th as surprised as powell is my guess--once the secretary eventually found out he'd been used at the expense of his most valuable asset: his credibility..
 
 while the new report repeatedly suggests the curveball handlers kept policymakers in the dark, remember powell's speech followed the 2003 state of the union address in which bush referred to the source of his own allegations about iraqi wmds as follows:
 
 From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.
 
 i'm sure the president's men made a heroic effort to find substance on which he could base those statements.  in the process, they had to have discovered what was up with curveball.  the cia may not have let the president in on the joke, but his people would have had to do so.  if they didn't know, they wouldnt have felt compelled to keep powell in the dark.  but they did and they did.  just as they knew he wouldnt say what they needed him to say at the un if he had any reservations about the sources. the only question i have is this:
 
what kind of people use someone honorable as colin powell so dishonorably?

i'm pretty sure the answer can be found in the report's footnotes 829. & 830.  Link

829 See, e.g., Senator Carl Levin, "Buildup to War on Iraq," Congressional Record (July 15, 2003) at pp. S9358-S9360; Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, "Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure from Cheney Visits," Washington Post (June 5, 2003) at p. A1; Nicholas D. Kristof, "White House in Denial," New York Times (June 13, 2003) at p. A33; Jay Taylor, "When Intelligence Reports Become Political Tools..." Washington Post (June 29, 2003) at p. B2; Douglas Jehl, "After the War: Weapons Intelligence; Iraq Arms Critic Reacts to Report on Wife," New York Times (Aug. 8, 2003) at p. A8; Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, "As Rationales for War Erode, Issue of Blame Looms Large," Washington Post (July 10, 2004) at p. A1; Glenn Kessler, "Analyst Questioned Sources' Reliability; Warning Came Before Powell Report to UN," Washington Post (July 10, 2004) at p. A9; T. Christian Miller and Maura Reynolds, "Question of Pressure Splits Panel," Los Angeles Times (July 10, 2004) at p. A1; James Risen and Douglas Jehl, "Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence," New York Times (June 25, 2003) at p. A11; Robert Schlesinger, "Bush Aides Discredit Analysts' Doubts on Trailers," The Boston Globe (June 27, 2003) at p. A25; Seymour M. Hersh, "The Stovepipe," The New Yorker (Oct. 27, 2003) at p. 77.

830 Our review has been limited by our charter to the question of alleged policymaker pressure on the Intelligence Community to shape its conclusions to conform to the policy preferences of the Administration. There is a separate issue of how policymakers used the intelligence they were given and how they reflected it in their presentations to Congress and the public. That issue is not within our charter and we therefore did not consider it nor do we express a view on it.