Cherry-picked Intelligence

Very revealing (and long) article from the former Middle East Chief of the CIA. The nut of it - what we already knew - intelligence was manipulated and cherry picked to support decisions already made. I particularly liked this bit:

[T]he greatest discrepancy between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned not WMD, but the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the "war on terror" and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalizing on the country's militant post-9/11 mood.