Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

[S]ome of the best work on the use of prewar intelligence has been done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank. Its painstaking study, from January 2004, compared what the various intelligence agencies were estimating about Iraq in the runup to the war to what administration officials were saying.

The authors arrived at this conclusion: ''Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon programs and ballistic missile programs."

In his Monday speech, Cheney labeled ''dishonest and reprehensible" the suggestion ''that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence."

But in a finding that speaks to that very point, the Carnegie Endowment report offered a detailed examination of the way the administration officials distorted intelligence by ''the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments" from their public statements.

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No matter how many speeches Cheney and Bush give, no matter how hard they deflect or whom they try to blame or hide behind, that's a truth they can't escape.