Dear Everyone;
www.antiwar.com has the Senate Report on the intelligence failure and the conclusions report on two pdf files. If you are interested in this you can down load them but be prepared for a wait the main report is 500 pages long. If you only have dial up not dsl or broadband it may take awhile.
Even with casual browser reading the reports read like the worst tragedy of errors. Compounded by pressure from the Bush people to produce a report slanted towards what the Bush people wanted. It is a perfect example of the Peter Principle: If anything can go wrong it will go wrong. The report is filled with the intelligence community and its agents providing supposed hard core details under the guise of wishful thinking, lack of double checking, group think, totally fallacious intelligence, lack of on the ground agents and believing reports from dis-affected Iraqis.
The whole report and its conclusion centers around the intelligence communities total failure of trade craft. No WMD's: no nuclear capabilities - no chemical weapons - no biological weapons - no long range rockets - no nothing. And all of it ruled over by a two bit latter day neo-Stalin carrying on like some Great Dictator out of a Charlie Chaplin movie satire gone awry.
The price is paid with 1,000 coalition soldiers killed, 5,000 wounded soldiers, some 10,000 Iraqis killed and some 20,000 plus wounded. And the US taxpayers ponying up $200 billion in funds stolen from the wallets.
King George the II building his Imperial Empire of Democracy on the shields, helmets and bodies of the fallen warriors whose spilt blood is turning the waters of the Tigris red. Sic Transit Gloria.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian