UPDATE, via TalkingPointsMemo

Sid Blumenthal has an editorial in The Guardian UK about the intelligence debate regarding Son of Gulf War. You can read it here.

EXCERPT:

If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel counter-CIA under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to "stovepipe" its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or state department intelligence for fear of corruption by scepticism. Instead, the Pentagon's handpicked future leader of Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, replaced the CIA as the reliable source of information, little of which turned out to be true - though his deceit was consistent with his record. Chalabi was regarded at the CIA as a mountebank after he had lured the agency to support his "invasion" of Iraq in 1995, a tragicomic episode, but one which hardly discouraged his neoconservative sponsors...

Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence á la carte.

In Bush's Washington, politics is the extension of war by other means. Rather than seeking to reform any abuse of intelligence, the Bush administration, through the Republican-dominated senate intelligence committee, is producing a report that will accuse the CIA of giving faulty information.
Final note: I'm not usually a defender of the CIA. That said, former agents like Victor Marchetti have stressed for years that the Agency has two arms, sometimes referred to as the Ivy Leaguers and the Cowboys. The Cowboys are the operation wing of the CIA, doing things like stirring up unrest in places like Chile, Guatemala, and Iran, while the Ivy Leaguers tend to be folks who read and analyze everything from confidential cables to newspapers. These are the folks whose job is to CENTRALIZE and organize the mass of data that is received regarding particular issues, e.g., WMD, or particular countries/regions. It is the so-called Ivy Leaguers that I have no gripe with....