The New Groupthink, by William Safire

The salient news in the Senate Intelligence Committee report is this: all you have been hearing about "he lied to us" and "they cooked the books" is a lot of partisan nonsense.

The 511-page Senate report concluded this: Nobody in the White House or the Pentagon pressured the C.I.A. to change an intelligence analysis to conform to the judgment that the world would be a safer place with the monstrous Saddam overthrown.

Ah, second-guessers say, but what about "groupthink"? Before Gulf War I, the consensus held that Saddam was five to 10 years away from producing a nuclear bomb, but when we went in, we discovered that his W.M.D. were less than six months away.

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Today, as Election Day approaches, groupthink has swung back again, to this: Saddam not only had no terror weapons, but he had little or nothing to do with Al Qaeda — therefore, our liberation of Iraq was a waste of lives and money.

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Strange, considering how the nation's interest is riveted on this week's report on our Iraqi intelligence mistakes, how little interest was shown in the Senate Intelligence Committee's extensive report on the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, which cost the lives of 17 American sailors.

The committee's staff director tells me that the 35-page document was disseminated to the intelligence community, but was never made public by Bob Graham, a Democrat who was chairman then. No reporter agitated for a copy until I just did.

If the committee was sharply critical of the C.I.A. in 2002, why wasn't the public alerted to the failures that led to the Cole bombing — and why wasn't action taken to shake up the place then?