Blogoland

Oh my. I can't believe this was actually in the report on intelligence failures in Iraq.

"The intelligence community needs to be pushed," the report said. "It will not do its best unless it is pressed by policy-makers -- sometimes to the point of discomfort."

It's not as if that kind of stuff is what got us into this mess in the first place, unless, of course, you're writing a report whose main purpose is to serve as a figleaf for the Preznit.

The report implicitly absolves the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the 2003 Iraq war, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the intelligence community.

"The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the Iraq war were flawed," the report said. "Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs."

Ugh.