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	Name:	Talullahhound -
	Subject:	But
	Date:	3/14/2009 4:18:32 PM

You can read and interpret intelligence in so many ways. You can rely on single reportings and call it the truth -- and it is for that instance. You can send that intelligence piece forward as the "truth" and over time you can create a mosiac that says what you can interpret as you wish. But if you chose other pieces, you could make an entirely different mosiac. It's a lot more art than it is a science.
My thing is this -- Colin Powell stated in his book and was also reported by Bob Woodward in hs book that Powell read the intelligence and found it lacking. And the night before he gave the report to the UN, they redid the briefing until he could feel less uneasy about it because he never felt confident about it. And in his various military jobs over his career, I have a feeling he read quite a bit of intelligence.

You are really hanging your hat on someting that is almost all shades of gray. And all the analysts didn't have to agree, but may have concurred in the reports in the absence of something else more solid. You know that Doug Feith started his own little "intelligence" cell out of his office (it was headed up by one of my former colleagues (Mike Maloof) because he didn't think that the CIA/DIA was coming up with the right intelligence to support an invasion of Iraq. I believe he talks about this in his (Feith's) book. Don't you think that if there was a strong case to be made for WMD or chemical weapons or terrorist training cells the Commander of CENTCOM would have been making the case to the President to invade Iraq? But, he wasn't. And he likely saw the same intelligence.