wrote:

I am not sure why it is the government's job to wage a war it got into
because the President of the United States lied.

Do you believe that if *you* repeat a lie enough times, it will make it
true?

The President didn't lie about anything. That little grandstanding episode
yesterday by the Dems was laughable. The report from "Phase II" of the
investigation into the build-up to the Iraq war was due to come out in the
next couple of weeks anyhow. So I'm not quite sure what the Dems were
asking for.

Regardless, here's what "Phase 1" of the committee investigation revealed:


Conclusion 12. Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained
the forged foreign language documents2 on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it
was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking
uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and
other available intelligence.

Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger,
disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the
Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report
lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and
Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment
that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.


(BLACKED OUT) Conclusion 77. The Intelligence Community relied too heavily
on United Nations (UN) BLACKED OUT information about Iraq's programs and did
not develop a sufficient unilateral collection effort targeting Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction programs and related activities to supplement
UN-collected information and to take its place upon the departure of the UN
inspectors.

(U) Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that
Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts
to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
capabilities.


(U) Conclusion 90. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment that Saddam
Hussein was most likely to use his own intelligence service operatives to
conduct attacks was reasonable, and turned out to be accurate.

(U) Conclusion 92. The Central Intelligence Agency's examination of
contacts, training, safehaven and operational cooperation as indicators of a
possible Iraq-al-Qaida relationship was a reasonable and objective approach
to the question.

(BLACKED OUT) Conclusion 94. The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably and
objectively assessed in Iraqi Support/or Terrorism that the most problematic
area of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida were the reports of training in
the use of non-conventional weapons, specifically chemical and biological
weapons. BLACKED OUT

(U) Conclusion 95. The Central Intelligence Agency's assessment on
safehaven - that al-Qaida or associated operatives were present in Baghdad
and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control - was reasonable.

U) Conclusion 97. The Central Intelligence Agency's judgment that Saddam
Hussein, if sufficiently desperate, might employ terrorists with a global
reach - al-Qaida - to conduct terrorist attacks in the event of war, was
reasonable.

U) Conclusion 102. The Committee found that none of the analysts or other
people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change
their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism. After 9/11, however,
analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to
avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the
scale of 9/11.