House Probers Conclude Iraq War Data Was Weak (washingtonpost.com): "Leaders of the House intelligence committee have criticized the U.S. intelligence community for using largely outdated, 'circumstantial' and 'fragmentary' information with 'too many uncertainties' to conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.
Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four months combing through 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq, found 'significant deficiencies' in the community's ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq, and said it had to rely on 'past assessments' dating to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and on 'some new 'piecemeal' intelligence,' both of which 'were not challenged as a routine matter.' "

First they fail to arrest the 9-11 terrorists when they were watching them before the attacks, and now they lead us up the garden path in Iraq. We're spending $30 Billion + on this misleading "intelligence" community.

We'd be better off employing people to read the newspapers. Those of us who did read the news knew that the intelligence assesments touted by Bush et al. were exagerated. Despite that, we were railroaded into the war. And the consequences are in the newspapers every day; tragedy for hundreds of US families, and thousands of Iraqi families.
- posted by geoff @ #