So, Bush didn't lie, Part IV (or V)

Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

Money quotes:

Contrary to what some defenders of the Intelligence Community have since asserted, these errors were not the result of a few harried months in 2002. Most of the fundamental errors were made and communicated to policymakers well before the now-infamous NIE of October 2002, and were not corrected in the months between the NIE and the start of the war. They were not isolated or random failings. Iraq had been an intelligence challenge at the forefront of U.S. attention for over a decade. It was a known adversary that had already fought one war with the United States and seemed increasingly likely to fight another. But, after ten years of effort, the Intelligence Commu­nity still had no good intelligence on the status of Iraq’s weapons programs. Our full report examines these issues in detail. Here we limit our discussion to the central lessons to be learned from this episode.

...

The Commission also learned that, on the eve of war, the Intelligence Community failed to convey important information to policymakers. After the October 2002 NIE was published, but before Secretary of State Powell made his address about Iraq's WMD programs to the United Nations, serious doubts became known within the Intelligence Community about Curveball, the aforementioned human intelligence source whose reporting was so critical to the Intelligence Community's pre-war biological warfare assessments. These doubts never found their way to Secretary Powell, who was at that time attempting to strip questionable information from his speech.

These are errors--serious errors. But these errors stem from poor tradecraft and poor management. The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments. [emphasis ours]

-more-

RIP, "Bush Lied" (again).

It seems silly to us that the same folks who spent a quarter of a century emasculating the CIA (thank you Frank Church and Bob Torricelli) should now react in horror when the organization f--ks up.

More worrisome though: What has the CIA missed that threatens us this moment? It's time to put some teeth back in this agency, put some gung ho, blood and guts people on the ground, play hardball with the bad guys and ignore the inevitable effeminate whinings from the likes of Paula Krugman and Michelle Moore.