Another report on pre-war WMD intelligence stuff. The basic picture I think we get from all of this is that the administration’s rhetoric certainly wasn’t a matter of "mistakes" or "bad intelligence" and probably wasn’t primarily the product of lies either. One reason some of us were so credulous about what they said before the war is that it just wouldn’t make sense to deliberately lie under circumstances where you were bound to get caught. What certainly I didn’t really consider when evaluating what was being said was the possibility — that now clearly seems to be the case — that they were just operating with a near-perfect indifference to the truth.
They "knew" what they wanted to know and the point of the intelligence community at that point wasn’t to uncover the truth but simply to provide the evidence necessary to reach the conclusion.
I said the very same thing to someone this weekend.