[kabar]

The chairman of the House intelligence panel said he is frustrated with the American intelligence community's lack of curiosity on following up these leads, particularly the story from Mr. Sada. "I talked to one person relatively high up in DNI, and I asked him about this and asked are they going to follow up, and he looked at me and said, 'No we don't think so.' At this point, I guess you guys don't get it.

"I am trying to find out if our postwar intelligence was as bad as our pre-war intelligence, " Mr. Hoekstra said.

US Intelligence has a vested interest in downplaying this information. Laurie Mylroie's Bush vs the Beltway details how the career bureaucracies at State and the CIA have again and again discounted intelligence that Saddam had WMD and links to AQ.

[maxter]

and the CIA director who supposedly told President Bush regarding WMDs in Iraq, "slam dunk" will be exonerated?

[arthurus]

Reagan found he had to wall off CIA from the real intelligence gathering because it was- and apparently always has been- full of Northeast elite Yale/Harvard types who insisted on giving the benefit of the doubt to the Communists on everything and taking the Commies' word about things like economìc progress. After the USSR went away there was much righteous indignation in the MSM and on the left about the stupid RR not paying attention to what his intelligence professionals were saying. Criminal charges were demanded because he ignored CIA reports-didn't even read them. That approach got so much negative traction with the public that it all got shut down over the course of a couple of days and was never raised again.

Today's CIA is still full of Arabists who think that the Arabs are the Wise Men of the Earth and ever so much more sensible than the excitable Jews.

[driftless]

Laurie Mylroie also has a story in todays Frontpagemag.com blog section about Hussein*s wmd programs. The story concerns the recently declassified Iraqi documents and how Hussein and his buddies most likely fooled the Unscom inspectors and continued their wmd program. The documents reveal that Hussein was not at all interested in dismantling his wmd and bio/chem programs.

Obviously as more info emerges and more documents are declassified, we will eventually get the full story. That*s if the anti-Bushies in the state department and the CIA don*t deliberately sabotage what comes out of these declassifications. Along with Steven Hayes, Mylroie has done extraordinary work uncovering Hussein*s wmds programs.