Yet more evidence appears to be forthcoming that the administration cooked the books on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- this time from the Silbermann/Robb commission:
According to officials who have scanned the document, the unclassified version of the report makes a "case study" of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, the major assessment that the intelligence agencies produced at the White House's behest - in a hurried few weeks - in 2002.
After the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House was forced to declassify part of the intelligence estimate, including the footnotes in which some agencies dissented from the view that Mr. Hussein had imported aluminum tubes in order to make centrifuges for the production of uranium, or possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
The report particularly ridicules the conclusion that Mr. Hussein's fleet of "unmanned aerial vehicles," which had very limited flying range, posed a major threat. All of those assertions were repeated by Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials in the prelude to the war. To this day, Mr. Cheney has never backed away from his claim, repeated last year, that the "mobile laboratories" were probably part of a secret biological weapons program, and his office has repeatedly declined to respond to inquiries about whether the evidence has changed his view.
(For references to deceptive claims about UAVs in All the President's Spin, click here. For references to claims about mobile labs, click here. Links courtesy of Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature.)
Update 4/4: It turns out that the commission denies that intelligence was politicized before the war and refused to look at political use of intelligence findings -- see Dan Froomkin here and .
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