http://www.tompaine.com/20050504/art..._the_facts.php

extract

"Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy."

Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in
black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years
now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have
been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered
by their countries' leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked
war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of
incredulity.

It has been a hard learning—that folks tend to believe what they want to
believe. As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive,
remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief. It simply is much
easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming
the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we
were sold a bill of goods.

Well, you can forget circumstantial. Thanks to an unauthorized
disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from
official documents—this time authentic, not forged. Whether prompted by
the open appeal of the international Truth-Telling Coalition or not,
some brave soul has made the most explosive "patriotic leak" of the war
by giving London's Sunday Times the official minutes of a briefing by
Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain's CIA equivalent, MI-6. Fresh
back in London from consultations in Washington, Dearlove briefed Prime
Minister Blair and his top national security officials on July 23, 2002,
on the Bush administration's plans to make war on Iraq.

Blair does not dispute the authenticity of the document, which
immortalizes a discussion that is chillingly amoral. Apparently no one
felt free to ask the obvious questions. Or, worse still, the obvious
questions did not occur.