Weapons Of Mass Disappearance

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released an interesting report a few weeks ago:

This new study details what the U.S. and international intelligence communities understood about Iraq's weapons programs before the war and outlines policy reforms to improve threat assessments, deter transfer of WMD to terrorists, strengthen the UN weapons inspection process, and avoid politicization of the intelligence process.

The report distills a massive amount of data into side-by-side comparisons of pre-war intelligence, the official presentation of that intelligence, and what is now known about Iraq's programs.

That last sentence caught my attention, and I downloaded the second chapter of the report (PDF), which contained charts with info such as this*:



The report also has this to say about the NIE:

Most of the official statements on Iraq's weapon programs were supported by a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq...Three aspects of this NIE merit particular attention: It was produced far more quickly than is normal for such documents; it went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years; and, it had more serious dissents to its key findings than any other declassified NIE.

I guess that's what happens when politics, and not good policy, is in the driver's seat. Can I call this 'lying' on the part of the Bush administration, or do I have to resign myself to 'misleading' and/or 'incompetence'? And does the American public even care?

ntodd

* I couldn't easily reproduce the chart in text, so did a screen shot. The info is truly side-by-side in the doc, but I moved the last few columns down to fit better on the screen.  ¶ 10:12 AM