The media provide better intelligence than the CIA: "the CIA did not bother to first examine the documents. An Italian journalist turned the papers over to the American Embassy in Rome that same month, but the CIA station chief in Rome apparently tossed them out, rather than send them to analysts at Langley. At a congressional hearing last week, the CIA’s Tenet was unable to explain why. “The CIA dropped the ball,” said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois. (Incredibly, the Italian press, which doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, appeared to have higher standards than the CIA. The Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, worked for Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. She went to Niger and checked out the documents but declined to use them because she feared they were bufala—fraudulent—and she would lose her job.) "

This points to something that has been clear to me since the end of the war and the beginning of the charges about dodgy intelligence: all the doubts about the Niger uranium were reported before the war. I knew about them just from reading the online media. So why did the politicians wait till after the war to start complaining?

The information that this was bad intelligence was available. But those in power turned a blind eye. And the media failed to investigate. They belittled the few who opposed the war. Downplayed the demonstrations. Highlighted whatever the [unattributed] sources wanted them to write.

Well thanks. CIA. Media. Politicians. You all need to do your jobs a lot better. Bush's deceptions about almost everything are transparent. So why are they almost never exposed in the media?
- posted by geoff @ #