Hmmm... let me say this:

Let’s assume that Cheney was innocent of the… let’s call it “innuendo”… within the Frontline piece where it is suggested that he forced a specific point of view from the analysts at CIA to justify his position… wrapping the intelligence around the policy, is how I think it was described in the show… so let’s assume that wasn’t the case at all, from early ’02 to early ’03.

Certainly there is a case to be made that US foreign intelligence was less than good over the last 20 years… there is little room to argue this, in fact. It doesn’t justify supporting or promoting unsubstantiated intelligence, or information from questionable sources as FACT… which is exactly what Tenant, Cheney and Rumsfeld were doing from Jan of ’02 on. SOMEONE… whether it was the senior cabinet members themselves or their support staffs… MUST have read in the raw data that they were basing ALL their estimates on information that was either 10 to 12 years old OR it was coming from sources that had questionable motives in wanting war in Iraq… namely Ahmed Chalabi and his bunch of high-paid criminals. Whether this information was wrapped up with NIE letterhead, to me, seems immaterial in the long run… the intel was questionable and should have been used as such.

A better question is how WRONG is Cheney and Rumsfeld for taking over the “intel” aspect of the pre-invasion planning stages that Tenant had already started with assets IN COUNTRY? Creating an intel organization out of local DIA assets (all ROTC bean-counters in camo-fatigues, according to McMasters in his interview) and “analysts” fro the Justice Department (???) when the CIA had already spent more than $140 million to get sources and people ready to cooperate in Iraq seems like the really HARD way to get shit done, and the QUICKEST way to cut a vital and ESTABLISHED agency of the US Government out of the loop… even if they have dropped the ball in the past.

Cheney and Rumsfeld fought tooth and nail to keep both State and CIA out of the loop from start to finish… and Tenant only got back into the loop by making sure the “intel” used for the speech to the UN Security Council was EXACTLY what THEY wanted said, no matter how stupid or WRONG it made Powell look when it was over. These are serious and (I think) well-documented actions to limit access and information that might have made a BIG difference in how things played out. These are not small points, or insignificant issues.