No Scandal

Rich Lowry: The WMD scandal that wasn't
Rich Lowry has great thoughts about the study of flawed Iraq and WMD(s) intelligence -- but don't expect the liberals to buy it or stop, nothing has stopped their rhetoric before from the 9/11 commission that did not give them the "smoking gun" they hoped for to the Iraqi elections -- so expect business has usual. Nevertheless, is it such a bad thing? Look we have Dean as the DNC head; he and many on the left keep spewing their hate proving that they are unwilling the work together, heal, and that their only desire - only goal is the Whitehouse forget anything else.

The commission studying the intelligence failures that produced disastrously flawed estimates of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities has finally produced its report, and it's devastating. Not just for U.S. intelligence, which is portrayed as hapless and bungling, but for Bush critics who have vested so much in the argument that Bush officials pressured intelligence agencies to support the case for war.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is the epitome of this school of thought. The very morning the report was released she wrote that "political pressure was the father of conveniently botched intelligence," and fingered Dick Cheney as the lead culprit. Cut to Page 50 of the WMD report: "The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs."

Pay particular attention to what Mr. Lower says here.

No. The change began in 2000, when President Clinton was still in office. It was based on information from a (totally dishonest, as it turns out) source code-named Curveball. That year, the National Intelligence Estimate was updated to say: "New information suggests that Baghdad has expanded its offensive BW program by establishing a large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capability.