http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/102903.aspxSenator Roberts, you have got to be kidding, right? by Josh Marshall
We know that our intelligence about what we’d find in Iraq was woefully off the mark. And many of the errors and misjudgments were contained in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which was cobbled together about exactly one year ago.
Why was the NIE so rushed and why was it produced when it was? An NIE is put together to assemble all the information in the intelligence community on a given topic. Normally, the point is to assist the executive — as well as the Congress — in the process of fashioning policy. But that’s not what happened here.
In other words, the NIE was only put together when the policy was being sold, not when it was being put together. So the administration could not have been misled or ill-served by it because it was never used to formulate policy. The administration only used it to sell the policy to a skeptical Congress.
The timing of the NIE points to another important conclusion. If you’re wondering why the document seemed so slanted in favor of alarmist judgments about Iraq’s WMD, it’s probably because it was produced for a White House that already had a policy in place. With the policy already decided upon, it was, shall we say, pretty clear how the White House wanted the report to turn out. And, unfortunately, the agency obliged.
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