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Gee, maybe it wasn't about getting back at Joe Wilson after all. Maybe it was about getting back at the CIA because they weren't producing the "right" intelligence. Didn't George's daddy ever tell him not to fuck with the CIA?

Financial Times:
Vince Cannistraro, former CIA operations chief, charged yesterday: "She was outed as a vindictive act because the agency was not providing support for policy statements that Saddam Hussein was reviving his nuclear programme."

The leak was a way to "demonstrate an underlying contempt for the intelligence community, the CIA in particular".

He said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the White House had exerted unprecedented pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find evidence that Iraq had links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb.

While the intelligence agencies believe their mission is to provide accurate analysis to the president to aid policy decisions, in the case of Iraq "we had policies that were already adopted and they were looking for those selective pieces of intelligence that would support the policy", Mr Cannistraro said.

In written testimony, he said that Vice-President Dick Cheney and his top aide Lewis Libby went to CIA headquarters to press mid-level analysts to provide support for the claim. Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence". Mr Cannistraro said his information came from current agency analysts.

Now that we know that even David Kay hasn't turned up any evidence of an extant nuclear program after 1991, this looks even worse. I'm just waiting now for the spin that the Financial Times is just part of the "liberal media" and how Cannistraro, who served on Reagan's NSC, is a partisan Democrat.

Beyond that, I'm getting really, really sick and tired of case after case after case where it's clear that this administration views facts only as things that can be pressed into service to support their predetermined ideological courses of action.

via Mark Kleiman