The real issue is not that intelligence was manipulated. It is that it was fundamentally unsound--that it misled the president and all the rest of us. The CIA, like most western intelligence services, relied heavily on the reports of the U.N. weapons inspectors. It had less than a handful of human sources in Iraq, none of whom was part of Saddam's inner circle. As one CIA officer put it, "If I put my finger up my nose, I would still have enough fingers to cover the number of our sources." The back story here, as Jim Hoagland put it in the Washington Post, was a CIA "rebellion against the White House, in part to shift attention from their [own] failures."
"Democrats who saw the same intelligence as President Bush drew the same conclusions. The failure to have developed a more accurate assessment of Saddam's secret weapons programs doesn't mean that going to war was right--and it certainly doesn't justify the way the war was executed. These are subjects worthy of grave attention. But to impugn the integrity of our leading officials and poison the atmosphere in which this country is fighting a war is irresponsible politics, and it ought to be stopped."
It's time for the Democrats to declare a timetable for withdrawal from this war on Bush. It's a quagmire.