The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the Iraq intelligence failure (23.4MB PDF) is quite damning. It’s 500 pages long, so I won’t be done with it for days, but the analysis has started to appear in the popular press. Writes Newsweek:
Taken together, the facts in the report show that virtually every major claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq — from Saddam’s growing nuclear program to his close ties with Al Qaeda — was either wrong or exaggerated.
The issue of culpability — whether the White House pushed the CIA to manufacture fake evidence, or if they’re just so foolish as to have accepted obviously-false data — is avoided in this report. Republicans demanded that the matter be addressed in a second report, one that is embargoed until after the election. Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos?