The hard news this weekend is going to be hard to find amidst the GOP talking points on the CIA and pre-war intelligence. While learning to blog, I had half an ear on CNN yesterday so I'm listening to the way this story is developing, and the cognitive dissonance is amazing. I have a personal dislike for news sites that make you register to pick up their articles, so I don't read the LA Times very often. Fortunately, other people read and blog it for me. Paul Woodward's excellent
The War in Context has a story from today's LAT that lays out the situation pretty well.
CIA may have been out of loop
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2003
Officials in the Bush administration appear to have bypassed the CIA and other agencies to collect their own intelligence overseas on Iraq, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday.
Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV's comments came as bipartisan cooperation on the committee's inquiry into prewar intelligence appeared to be unraveling. Democrats complained that Republicans are out to pin blame on the CIA and shield the White House from criticism that intelligence used to make the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated..
After reviewing tens of thousands of pages of intelligence documents, the committee staff has begun drafting a report that sources said would harshly criticize the CIA for prewar judgments that congressional investigators believe were unfounded, thinly sourced or lacked adequate caveats.
Democrats, who have been rebuffed by Republicans in their efforts to widen the probe's scope, threatened Friday to launch a separate investigation. Several committee Democrats said it is now all but inevitable that they will produce a separate report.
The spinpoints yesterday, advanced by the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were that the intel community screwed up and did a lousy job. As I think we all know by now, the problem is that the intel pros were simply ignored, but it looks right now that the Senate Dems are going to have to issue their own report to get that news out.
We'll be dealing with more on the intel story today, Paul has really done a nice job of aggregating the stories. On the top left of his homepage, he's assembled a list of links to all the relevant documents in the Plame Affair. Go take a look.
