Demagogue

The Washington Post has a very good article on pre-war intelligence failures. It seems clear, though the article does not say it, that those at the upper-level of the Bush administration were intent on believing that Iraq had WMDs and were willing to ignore any evidence to the contrary

Up until the days before U.S. troops entered Iraqi territory that March, the intelligence community was inundated with evidence that undermined virtually all charges it had made against Iraq, the report said.

In scores of additional cases involving the country's alleged nuclear and chemical programs and its delivery systems, the commission described a kind of echo chamber in which plausible hypotheses hardened into firm assertions of fact, eventually becoming immune to evidence.

There is too much information in the article to excerpt here, but the chronicle of the CIA's dogged refusal to believe that the intercepted aluminum tubes could be used for anything other than a centrifuge is pathetic.

But even more pathetic was the Defense Intelligence Agency's willingness to rely on an Iraqi defector known as "Curveball."

Read the article - it is unbelievable.