Decider George went around blubbering last week about how the CIA screwed way-up over Iraqi WMD: Sorry about that, “just wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
The intel was different, asshole.
It just wasn’t war material.
Based upon curveball information, goaded by an Iraqi expatriate and doing as the Brits reported: “…the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” — Decider George engineered a tragic, horrific event.

And to build this platform of intelligence and facts to be fixed around an objective of kicking Saddam’s ass the White House put together the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, which gathered all the info into one nice, neat little package.

In September 2002, Decider George had his hands on top-secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMDs, though he blew it off.

(Illustration found here).

Yesterday, a chief spook blew it all back at the lying lame duck.
Thomas Fingar, just retired deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, working out of the State Department and constantly colliding with the White House on Iraq, told reporters he’d discovered a couple of important things working in DC: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”
And constant harping makes anything so:

• It’s my observation that it’s very hard to dislodge a mistaken interpretation once it gets into the head of a decisionmaker who has used it in a speech, built it into a policy, conveyed it to colleagues around the world,” Fingar said.
  “That puts to me an awfully high premium on taking the time to get it right.”

Helen Thomas touched on this so-called intelligence failure in a story today:

• In the interviews conducted since the Nov. 4 elections, Bush has blamed the CIA for faulty claims that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This turned out not to be the case.
  …
  There is ample evidence that Bush had access to many contrary opinions before deciding to go to war, but clearly it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
  Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill wrote in his memoirs that he was baffled to learn that the president started planning for the invasion of Iraq a few days after he took office in his first term. O’Neill was later fired from the Cabinet.
  Former White House intelligence chief Richard Clarke said Bush took him aside after the 2001 terrorist attacks and told him to find a link between Iraq and the Al-Qaida perpetrators of the disaster. However, it turned out that there were no Iraqis involved.

Read Thomas’ piece here.

Intelligence is in those who have ears to hear.