Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Going into the war against Iraq, we had very strong intelligence," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on July 31, referring to Operation Iraqi Freedom. "I've been in this business for 20 years. And some of the strongest intelligence cases that I've seen, key judgments by our intelligence community that Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade, if left unchecked; that he had biological and chemical weapons; that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. We had very strong intelligence going in."
"Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use," Barton Gellman writes in today's Washington Post.
This doesn't necessarily prove dishonesty on the part of the Bush Administration. They could have just made a mistake, with the possibilities in that category ranging from an honest mistake to one that stems from badly structured analysis, but there does appear to be a great gap between what the administration said was true about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and what was in fact true.
