Worth Reading: Walter Pincus on former CIA Near East and South Asia national intelligence officer Paul Pillar truth-squading the administration on pre-war intelligence uses and abuses in the upcoming Foreign Affairs:

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."

The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Here's Pillar's Foreign Affairs piece which seems to have jumped its embargo date from the looks of its circulation across the web.

Posted by Laura at February 10, 2006 02:05 PM