How To Blame The CIA and Get Away With It
Tim Bray has done us all a favor and spent a night of his life reading the 521 page Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. If you cannot be bothered to read the whole thing, please see his post on the report. He's pulled out, summarized, and provided commentary on various import aspects of the report. He also provides pointers to the juicier parts.
If you hadn't already heard of all this, the report is probably best summarized in a paragraph by this article excerpt from Joshua Marshall:
Sen. Rockefeller and the rest of the Democrats on the Committee voted unanimously to approve the report that a) places all the blame for the intelligence failures on the CIA, b) specifically—and quite improbably—rules out administration pressure as a cause of the problem, and c) avoids any discussion of how or whether the administration manipulated or distorted intelligence community findings to build their case for war.
Important stuff. It is extremely hard to pin anything on the CIA when everything they look at is considered a matter of national security. I guess no one told Senator Rockefeller.